The Secret Weapon of Great Leaders: Effective Delegation
Congratulations, you’ve made it. You’ve finally landed the job - the one that puts you in a position of power. You now get to make the decisions.
First of all, you need to decide what kind of leader you’re going to be. You already know that you’re not going to make the same mistakes that the people you used to report to made. No, your team(s) are going to be effective. Things are going to get done. Problems will be solved.
I’ve got some bad news for you: the last person in your role thought the same thing.
The challenge here is that we don’t have a great definition for what effective leadership is. We often define it by emulating individuals - business leaders, politicians (yikes), celebrities (oof), historical figures (problematic), or actor’s portrayals of historical figures (even more problematic). None of those actually help you to define if what you’re doing is good.
Over the last few months, I’ve settled on a concise definition:
Good leadership is the ability to effectively delegate decision making down to the right levels.
That breaks down into three pieces:
People need to understand how to make decisions.
They need to understand how to make the right decisions.
And they need to understand whether they should be the one making this decision.
How to make decisions:
Most of us don’t like making decisions. We put them off to the last minute. We want to keep our options open, always hoping that a better idea might appear before we have to actually decide.
But that’s not actually true. We make decisions all of the time - it’s just that some decisions are harder to make than others. The easy decisions get made quickly, and with so little friction that we hardly notice that we made one at all. The trick is to minimise the amount of decisions that aren’t in this category by breaking the scary ones down whenever we can.
Faith Forster shared a mental model of the Decision Matrix she uses with her teams that’s perfect for this:
It breaks things down into 4 quadrants:
When there’s LOW Risk and the Opportunity is CLEAR, there should be a bias towards action. Ship it & measure, especially if there’s a way to roll the decision back as needed.
When there’s LOW Risk and the Opportunity is UNCLEAR, you want to be scrappy. Don’t do any more work than is necessary at this stage; get just enough information to move forward and make a decision about whether this should be pursued.
When there’s HIGH Risk and the Opportunity is CLEAR, that’s the time for a careful, iterative design & testing process. I’ve used a stage-gate process in these cases, especially when dealing with regulatory or compliance issues, enterprise sales organisations, or other places of great scale.
When there’s HIGH Risk and the Opportunity is UNCLEAR, there’s often a requirement to build consensus by pursuing a deep & rigorous understanding of the opportunity with a cross-functional group. Only then is it worth moving forward.
How to make the right decisions:
To be able to make a decision, certain things have to be in place:
The components of a good strategy have to be in place. Martin Eriksson does a great job of illustrating this in his Decision Stack, which builds off of Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solutions Tree.
If you’re missing any of these elements, it can be difficult - or impossible! - to answer the WHY and HOW questions in a coherent way.
The strategy - and the reasoning behind it - has to be widely communicated and understood. People have to have context to fully understand the decisions that have been taken, and what their role is in making it happen.
There must be a culture that allows people to communicate effectively. When circumstances change or new things are discovered, the organisation can only adapt if that information is shared effectively. Working from an outdated strategy is as harmful as working from no strategy.
An organisation can’t fulfil its potential if the people in it don’t all understand WHAT is being prioritised, WHY that’s important, HOW they contribute, and if there are specific time constraints (WHEN) that affect trade-offs.
Who makes the decision?
A few years ago, I came across Roman Pichler’s Decision Making Chart, and it changed both my approach and how I teach this to others. In many organisations, we have the problem of management by consensus: everyone has to be consulted, and feels like they have to be in every meeting. That leads to paralysis.
Roman’s chart broke it open for me: there are decisions that I needed to make, but others should be delegated. And when I needed to take it to others for consultation or approval, that didn’t mean that I always needed unanimous approval. Not everyone should have an opinion on everything, though it’s very helpful for them to have the opportunity to give feedback.
Based on the analysis of risk and ambiguity, you can determine if this is an opportunity to just try something (low risk, high certainty), give people time to comment before you make the decision yourself, or whether you need a formal approval process. You’d be amazed at how you can often break things down into components that you have the authority to move forward on, and then to use the results of those decisions to help others make much more informed decisions.
One more: What happens after a decision is made?
There’s only one thing worse than a decision avoided - and that’s when a critical decision isn’t communicated. The challenge is that it’s incredibly difficult to know when a decision might be important to someone else.
Mapping your stakeholders and partners is a great exercise for this - but creating effective active and passive
communication strategies for them is an often-overlooked but absolutely critical step as well. (See the Influence / Interest Map in my post about Schrödinger's Product Team
Note: This is equally applicable at all levels. You’re a Product manager? Great, this applies at the team level. You’re in the C-suite? OK, this works across the whole company? And if you’re somewhere in between, it works across the team(s) that your decisions influence.
Disclaimer: There are, of course, other critical elements to leadership. You need to be able to motivate and inspire people, develop them, and be able to adapt to changing situations, for example… but I’d argue that all of that is necessary to achieve the definition above.