Delegation: Stop Doing the Work Below Your Level
Updated: 4 days ago
Trait 28 is Delegation, and the book opens it with a line worth hearing twice: the most important thing you can do with work below your level is stop doing it.
That sounds like a time management tip. It is a presence issue. When a leader keeps doing work below their level, 2 things happen that people can see. The work at their actual level gets less of them, because capacity is finite, and the people above notice the strategic work that is not happening. And the team reads the message under the behavior. A leader who will not let go is telling the team, quietly and every day, that they cannot be trusted with it. Nobody says it out loud. Everybody hears it.
The book names the trap at the center of this one: delegating the tasks but keeping the decisions. It looks like delegation. It is the worst of both worlds, because the person does the work without the ownership, and you still carry the weight. Close behind it is taking the work back when it is not done your way. If the standard for delegation is “do it my way,” it barely counts.
So the practice. Hand over the whole job, not only the parts you do not want. Give the outcome you need, not the steps to get there. Be clear about scope, context, and who owns what. Then step far enough back for them to do it their way, and hold them to the result without hovering over the process. And treat busyness as the reason to delegate, not the reason you cannot. The book’s sign that it is working: work moves in your absence, and the team does not wait for you on things inside their scope.
The move this week comes straight from the book’s 48-hour experiment. Find one task you did this week that someone on your team could have done at 70 percent. Hand it off.
Give them the result you need, not the method. Then do not touch it. 70 percent done by someone else is worth more than 100 percent done by you, because the 30 percent is where they grow, and the time you get back is where you lead.
Watch what happens to your team when the work is really theirs. Then watch what happens to you when your calendar finally matches your level.
Executive Presence: 50 Traits. The field guide. www.therightaltitudebook.com
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