Increase Your Leadership Impact by Avoiding These 3 Delegation Traps

One of the most difficult challenges when leading a team is adapting how you lead to keep up with growth and change. Particularly in startups, what made sense a year ago or even three months ago often doesn’t make sense today.

Whether you’re a first line manager, a CEO, or anything in between, being aware of these three delegation traps and avoiding them will increase your impact by freeing you up to work on what you are uniquely suited to do.

Trap 1: Doing a direct report’s job under the guise of unblocking them

Great managers unblock their team allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently, effectively, and with higher morale.

Unblocking means either getting things out of your direct report’s way or streamlining a system/process so they can do their job better or faster.

Unblocking can happen in many forms. Here are just a few examples: a founder creating core values to guide how employees operate and make decisions in ambiguous situations, a CEO ensuring there’s a clear process for headcount allocation and exceptions, a first line manager making sure a team member has the ergonomic equipment they need, a business unit leader implementing an effective collaborative escalation procedure, or a product team leader partnering with customer support to create a less disruptive way to surface feedback from customers.

In an attempt to unblock their direct reports, managers can fall into a trap of doing a job responsibility of their direct report. This often happens with a part of the job the manager or their direct report perceives as unenjoyable. But this behavior is not unblocking, it’s doing the direct report’s job. It’s also not empowering to your direct report who should be capable of handling it and maybe even developing a way to do it more efficiently. Performing part of your direct report’s job gets in the way of you performing your job. The best thing you can do for your direct report is to perform your job effectively, including setting clear direction, helping team members grow in their careers, managing up, and keeping the team operating efficiently.

Managers of every level can fall into this trap. I see it most with first line managers, particularly if they transitioned from an individual contributor role to a people management role on the same team. These managers often were responsible for one or more pieces of individual contributor work that they don’t give up when they transition to management.

I fell into this trap when I transitioned from being an individual contributor to be the manager of Airbnb’s Production Infrastructure team. I was the expert on Amazon Web Services permissions and was still handling permission grants for engineers across the entire company. I knew (or thought I knew) that no one liked this work and I thought I was unblocking my team by doing it myself. However, I was now the single owner who would block people on other teams during meeting-heavy days. In addition, since I was getting less involved with the codebase, I had less context about what permissions a requesting engineer really needed. I finally delegated this to members of my team. I felt guilty delegating this at the time, but quickly found my team then created a more efficient way to grant permissions and spread the knowledge across more people on the team.

To avoid this trap, when you’re doing something for your team, ask yourself “is this unblocking my team or is it me doing their job?”

Trap 2: Doing everything that spans your entire team yourself

This is a trap that any manager can fall into, but is particularly prevalent with leaders of entire functions (e.g. product design, sales, engineering) because they are responsible for functional standards of excellence as well as efficient processes for how their function works with other functions.

As a functional leader, you need to ensure that your function has career ladders, standards for how work is done and evaluated, and so on. The key word here is ensure. You don’t have to be the one who does all the work to make it happen.

In fact, delegating work that spans the entire function is a great way for your direct reports to grow in their careers. It also frees you up to do the work that you are uniquely suited and expected to do in your role (for example, a functional leader interfacing with the CEO and their peers who lead other functions).

If you’re a first line manager, you can delegate some higher level tasks to a senior individual contributor who has expressed interest in management. If you’re a CEO, you can delegate creating a structure and cadence for how quarterly plans are set across the company.

I delegated creating an updated version of expectations per level for individual contributors in the function I ran to a manager on my team. The product that came back was better than I would have done myself in large part because the manager I delegated to was closer to the individual contributors’ work than I was. This experience helped set that manager up to be promoted after I left the team.

As you look to delegate work that spans your entire team, you’ll find that some direct reports would be really good at and interested in one piece of work, but completely uninterested in some other piece of work. For each thing you delegate, it’s helpful to find someone to delegate to who is interested in the work, even if it’s a bit of a stretch for them. You can also pair people up on your team to work together on something.

It’s worth noting that just because you delegated something that spans the entire team, it’s still important that you review it and give feedback on it since you still need to ensure it gets done and is of high quality.

Trap 3: Letting what you like doing influence what gets done

All of us have things we tend to like doing and things we don’t. Some leaders love creating systems to track objectives and key results (OKRs). Some can hardly use a spreadsheet. Some managers love planning social events for their team, others can’t stand it.

Being a leader who likes to do some things and not others is perfectly fine. However, it’s important not to let that get in the way of what gets done. To paraphrase management guru, Peter Drucker: executives don’t get paid to do what they like, they get paid to get the right things done.

What we dislike doing (or are not good at doing) can cloud our minds when we’re thinking about what would make the team and company most successful. This can result in us thinking something important is a “nice to have” just because we don’t like doing it.

To avoid this trap, always figure out what needs to get done to make your company or team as successful as possible before figuring out what you’ll do yourself.

Only after you’ve established what needs to get done, should you determine who should do what.

As part of determining who does what, you can ask yourself “what am I uniquely suited to do because of my position?”

There are going to be some things you don’t like doing that you will simply have to do because of your position. For example, a people manager has to do performance reviews for their direct reports even if they don’t like doing them. A CEO may dislike presenting at company all-hands meetings, but there’s no good substitute for the company hearing directly from the CEO.

However, in many cases it helps to delegate large chunks of things you’re uniquely suited for in your position. I know a VP whose Chief of Staff creates the slides for every presentation the VP does. I know another VP who has a Chief of Staff at the same company who always does their slides themselves because the process of creating slides helps them create clarity for themselves.

Once you’ve determined the things that are uniquely suited for you to do because of your position, you can determine what else you’ll do and what gets delegated. Some things that might be possible to delegate might also be uniquely suited for you to do because of your skills, context, or passion.

As you’re determining what gets delegated, it’s helpful to articulate to yourself why you’re keeping each item or why you’re delegating it. This articulation helps keep you honest and brings to light potential issues you might not have otherwise seen. For example, if there’s something you keep doing yourself because you have so much more context than anyone else, you can consider giving someone on your team that context so they can do it themselves.

As you go through this exercise, you can identify gaps that you and your team have. You can make your next hires ones that complement the current skills and interests of the team.

Cascading Delegation

You may be thinking, “how can I delegate these items when all my direct reports are already so busy?” It’s a great question. Particularly in multi-level organizations, I’ve found that when you delegate higher level items to your team members, they can often free up space by delegating some work they were planning to do to someone on their team. This allows for more higher level work to get done and for people all throughout your organization to grow more in their careers. I saw this effect directly as I delegated more to a manager who reported to me who subsequently delegated more to a manager on their team. The manager and I even talked about this explicitly before I started delegating more to them. Both managers became better leaders because of this.

Increasing Your Impact

By consistently avoiding the three delegation traps of: (1) doing a direct report’s job under the guise of unblocking them, (2) doing everything that spans your entire team yourself, and (3) letting what you like doing influence what gets done, you’ll be freed up to spend more of your time on things you are uniquely suited to do. Often this means more time thinking strategically and seeing around corners. Additionally, your direct reports (and even their direct reports) will become more effective leaders themselves, solve bigger problems, and grow in their careers.

Insight and Action

I coach leaders to help them gain insight and take action. Answering these questions will help you generate insights and actions that are specific to you and increase your impact by avoiding delegation traps.

• Which of the three delegation traps do you find yourself falling into most often?

• What’s something important to get done that keeps getting pushed back? What story do you keep telling yourself about it?

• What’s something you thought you needed to do yourself that, upon reflection, you can delegate? How and when will you delegate it?

• What can you put in place for yourself to consistently avoid delegation traps in the future?

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