Delegating to Level Up Your Skills

As you improve your skills, a natural development is to increase your scope of influence. Unfortunately, you usually can’t maintain all the responsibilities you have today and take on more scope. The best way to resolve this is with delegation.

Note: This applies to both a developer taking on more of a leadership role (tech lead, project lead, etc.) and a manager growing more influence.

Delegation is one of several tools at your disposal, but in the matrix of prioritization, it’s the only solution that gets the work done without you having to do it.

Editor’s note: This post definitely feels light on information at this time. I’m writing it at 9pm after spending a good part of the day writing a different article which I scrapped. The main point of this post is that you should embrace letting go of control. I’ll come back to this to improve it another time.

When to Delegate#

It isn’t always easy knowing in the moment when you should take on a task personally or when you should delegate. Doing regular self-reflection can help. Journaling at the beginning and end of each work day has helped me stay focused and prioritize tasks. It’s also let me discover when my work-load is becoming too much for me to handle alone, and I’ve identified times when another person was better for a task that I was trying take on.

You may also consider just assessing whether to delegate each time you’re about to take on an additional task. I find this to be more cumbersome because I have to go over my task-list with each new task. While I regularly add multiple tasks to my to-do list in a day, I rarely get a task that is so urgent that it can’t wait until my next morning journaling/prioritizing session.

The main criteria I use to determine if I should delegate a task are, in prioritized order:

Is it something only I can do?
Would someone else be better at it?
Do I have time to do it?

If there’s a task that only I can do (such as compensation planning for my team) then I can’t delegate it. If I don’t have enough time to do it, however, then I have to delegate other tasks on my to-do list.

If someone else would be better at a task but is unavailable, then it’s okay for it to fall on me as long as I have time.

As your ownership grows, it’s tempting to try to handle it all. However, I fundamentally disagree with the phrase “if you want something done right, do it yourself” and I’m not the only one. One way to find a good balance is delegating until you have less than full capacity in your own workload. When you try to tackle everything, you are more likely to burn out, quickly reducing your contributions to a minimal crawl. You may also not be able to deliver everything you’re expecting to or have committed to. Finally, as you overwork yourself by not delegating, the quality of your work can suffer if you have too many tasks pulling your attention.

How to Delegate For Personal Growth#

There’s plenty of other sources to learn how to delegate, so I won’t go into much detail about how to delegate. Instead, I’ll focus on how to use it for personal growth.

Two big caveats: don’t focus on growth, focus on doing your job well and growth will follow; and you should never over-delegate or try to simply absolve yourself of responsibility.

Building Systems of Responsibility#

Systems of Responsibility can look like a lot of things. Having a code review or pull-request process is a system of responsibility that distributes the load of ensuring high quality. A rotation for running a team sync is a system that distributes the need to plan and lead meetings. You may also consider what a system to support sprint planning, retrospectives, and onboarding might look like.

Start with a problem. Figure out the lowest level of ownership that should tackle the problem by working your way from bottom up. In the team sync example, everyone at every level could be involved. To ensure code quality, having devs review each others code usually works for larger orgs, or senior devs and tech leads reviewing code for smaller orgs. For sprint planning, it’s likely that one step up - a project lead, tech lead, or product manager - needs to be responsible since they have a higher-level overview of the work and roadmap. The challeging part is coming up with the specific changes. I don’t have any guidance here other than brainstorming with others and logically reasoning about what impact a change will have.

You likely won’t create a perfect system from the start. It’s good to have a metric that you can measure before and after you implement the system or process, and then you’ll have a baseline to measure progress by. This can help guide you in making improvements over time. You may have to continually tweak a system as various factors change, but being a metric will make it easier to figure out what changes need to be made.

The key to growth is setting your team up to run more autonomously. Counter-intuitive perhaps, since it may sound like you’re putting yourself out of a job. In reality, as different tasks get handled autonomously, you free up your time for more coaching, optimizing, and innovating.

When you are successfully delegating, you can better focus on your top priorities. These are the times you will be doing your best work since you’ll have more dedicated focus-time. If you delegate effectively and set up systems to handle it for you, your whole team will be operating well.

Staying Accountable#

Reminder: delegation does not mean you are free from responsibility. In order to truly free up your time from this task and not create additional overhead, make sure duties are well established and needs are communicated. As stated in the first article linked in this section (the word “plenty”):

Start by specifying the outcome you desire to the people you trust to deliver it. Establish controls, identify limits to the work and provide sufficient support, but resist upward delegation. Keep up to date with progress, and focus on results rather than procedures. Finally, when the work is completed, give recognition where it’s deserved.

Nobody To Delegate To?#

Sometimes there may be nobody else you can delegate to. This can occur when there isn’t enough staffing to do a task in the expected timeline. This is a tough situation and I feel for you. Hold on, do your best, and try not to burn out.

Hopefully you found some of this helpful. If you did or have other ideas for me to write about, please reach out to me on Twitter! Thanks for reading!