I was beginning to read the book Who Not How, when a sudden reminder surfaced. Prior to that moment, I had agreed to wrap up a stalled project with a summary of tasks completed and tasks remaining to complete the MVP. There was a possibility that the visionary partner on that startup was willing to buy the software that I had written. For almost two years, I had slowly developed this software myself. At some point, I had recruited an intern-level individual contributor from my alma mater and paid them from my own pocket. Needless to say, since the project was in deadlock and I was well over the idea, I welcomed the chance to wrap up that saga. I knew that I needed to get this task done in the next week to get the ball rolling.
Thoughts went through my head about how I could complete said task. If the codebase was substantial enough, I could have built some LLM solution to read all my code and give me a synopsis. I needed such a solution for future endeavors anyway. But at the same time, that wasn’t the shortest path to the target end result. I could make the Trello board I used to keep track of work items public and ask ChatGPT to read all the completed items. But realistically, that’s probably too many tokens for it to read and I would likely need to write a bunch of code to use the OpenAI API to iteratively go through the whole board for the synopsis I desired. That idea sounded cool and fun, but it was also an even heavier lift than the previous one. Shoot, I should just spend an hour, go through the code, and write a synopsis the old fashioned way.
Then it hit me, I was literally just reading a book about delegating things to other people. In fact, as a leader and a manager, I’m well aware of the need to delegate simpler tasks to free myself up for “higher value tasks”. I should call up the university student I was working with, and ask him to do the task for double their normal rate. By the math, double his rate is still significantly less than what I make in an hour at my 9-to-5. And I certainly had higher value tasks that I needed to be working on with my real estate business (I didn’t have any personal tech projects at the time). So this should be a no-brainer decision, nothing more than a “more than” comparator in the branching logic of my mind. But then, the very next thought, “I’d probably just waste that hour watching TV with my wife.” And with that, I short-circuited my reasoning back to “I’ll just do that myself.”
I could write a whole article on time management (and I inevitably will), but in the interest of staying on topic, I won’t here.
The Place of Delegation
In my experience, professionals who have been successful as individual contributors and are making the transition to management have a hard time with the act of delegating. Frequently, the excuse we tell ourselves is “it will be faster if I do it myself.” And that usually is the case. However, it misses the point of management entirely. Management is not measured by the output of any individual work item—it is measured by the output of the group under management. Outside of that quantitative lens, the manager of the group is responsible for the success of the overall team and the scalability of its practices. Doing a lot (subjective amount) of work items yourself is not scalable.
Beyond management as a concern, it’s additionally poor leadership to always assume difficult tasks in favor of speed. Yes, there are moments where the previous statement is not valid, like when the team might be under the gun to get that feature out on a tight deadline. However, if you always take on work items you’re the domain expert on within your team structure, you are robbing others of the chance to learn and grow in that direction. Consider how a work item (or a subset of the item) might be the perfect vehicle for someone to learn something new.
Here’s some key takeaways:
- Delegation is good for the speed of the overall team’s initiatives. Unlock your time as a person who can engage in higher value activities and use your time wisely.
- Delegation is an opportunity for coaching and educating. Use when there is appropriate slack time to accommodate the learning opportunity.
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