Every management shelf carries the same instruction: delegate more, you are doing too much yourself, your job is to work through others. It is good advice and it is missing a condition that matters more than the advice does.
Delegating work you have done is a transfer of execution. You can specify the outcome, you know roughly how long it takes, you can tell from the first draft whether it is going well, and when the person is stuck you can say something useful. Delegating work you have never done is a transfer of the whole thing — specification, judgement and outcome — to somebody you cannot evaluate.
The absence shows up as a review that cannot happen
The tell is not that the work goes wrong. Frequently it goes fine, because the person is competent and the task was well within them. The tell is what happens when it does not.
A manager who has done the work says the second section is the problem, the assumption underneath it is doing too much, redo that part. A manager who has not says it needs to be stronger, or asks whether the client will like it, or approves it because it looks like the thing. None of those are review. They are variations on assent, and the person receiving them learns nothing.
I want to be careful, because this can be read as an argument that managers must out-perform their teams, which is nonsense and produces the worst kind of supervisor. A chief executive cannot write the code. The point is narrower: somewhere in the chain between the person doing the work and the person accountable for it, there must be somebody who could do it and can therefore judge it. Where that person does not exist, the organisation is not managing the work, it is receiving it.
This is becoming more common rather than less, and for a structural reason. Careers that once ran through the doing now frequently route around it — the analyst becomes a manager of analysts without the years of analysis, because the reps that produced that judgement were the entry-level work now being automated. The consequence arrives later and looks like a mysterious decline in quality control.
It compounds with span. A manager with too many reports cannot examine any of their work closely enough to notice, so the stretched span of control hides the problem while making it worse.
The practical version is a question I would ask before handing anything over. If this comes back wrong, will I know? If the answer is no, delegate it anyway — but find the person who would know, and put them between you and it.
Topics opinionmanagementleadership
