How Delegation Improves Organizations

30 May 2021

Leaders/ managers are assigned a lot of work. Work that, in order get done, will have to be distributed across their team. This is why leaders/ managers exist, to parallelize work across a team. If a leader/ manager can’t delegate, or doesn’t do it well, that’s a big issue because that’s literally why their job exists.

Another important part of delegation, which is a follow-on consequence of doing it well: work is not only parallelized across individuals, but also allows some degree of variation in how it gets done across team members. Everyone does things a little bit (or a lot) differently.

This variation involves some risk, because some reports will do tasks better than others, and generally most reports will do tasks worse than their manager. This is one of the fundamental challenges of the manager: delegate a task or do it yourself? Doing tasks yourself is less risky in the short run, but more risky in the long run because of the opportunity cost of a team not learning and growing.

Over the long run, the risk of delegation should be worth taking because, even if the task at hand is critical to the organization’s success, it’s a chance for learning and growth. After all is said and done, reports who complete tasks differently and better (especially if better than their manager) should be able to describe why they did what they did. That strategy can then become a learning that can be applied across an organization. This is how best practices are formed.

One of the primary goals of organizational leaders and managers then is to set up an environment where this learning can be applied effectively and efficiently to all work in their organization.

This is the cycle:

1. Have similar/ comparable work done by different units,
2. Assess results and outcomes produced by those units,
3. Observe and record learnings from unit mistakes/ successes, and
4. Copy successful practices across the organization

Why does this work so well? Because it replicates the most powerful force in the universe: evolution. The important piece for organizations, though, is to be diligent about capturing and copying learnings (i.e. parts 3 and 4).

Biology captures and copies automatically by way of DNA and natural selection. In human organizations, there’s no guarantee the right processes are set up to do capturing and copying well. This is the challenge of building a learning organization, and is one of the main responsibilities of leadership.

So, to sum up: not only is delegation critical to getting work done at scale in an organization, but failing to do it basically guarantees your team will not learn and grow.