Delegation as three default moves
My take is that delegation is not complicated. In concept, it’s simple: you give others things to do that you used to do. Yet, people find this hard to execute or they make the threshold criteria for trying it super exacting. They’ll only delegate when they’ve got ample evidence that the other person has succeeded at doing this exact thing in the past. They delegate sparingly because they assume delegation is a clean and complete giving away of responsibility.
In my experience, good delegators delegate a lot. When they delegate, they rely on three defaults:
They delegate by default. They flip the presumption that they should do most things and sparingly hand things to others. They need to justify when and why they are not delegating.
Then they trust but verify by default.
When verification fails, they micromanage (or “teach, model, and supervise”, if you prefer) by default.
Almost every delegation failure I see is someone stuck in one of these modes and refusing to use the others. The person who only delegates has abdicated responsibility. The person who only verifies has built a bottleneck. The person who only micromanages hasn’t really delegated at all.
Fluency with these defaults lets you delegate with confidence. You don’t have to answer a big painful question about how much you trust people or even how skilled your team is. You’re constantly handing responsibility to your people, checking that they’ve exercised that responsibility well, and teaching them how when they don’t.
-ben
The sudden sabbatical test
When an executive tells me they have no time for strategic work, they often also tell me they need more staff. Specifically, that they need a chief of staff.
A variable of at least equal weight rarely comes up in these conversations. That variable is the strength of their leadership team.
An executive is truly operating at an executive level when they’ve handed what they used to do to the leadership team as a collective. The bar for this is high. You should ask yourself: would my leadership team do a fantastic job if I were suddenly on sabbatical and they had no time to prepare?
Here’s a two-part test that can help you figure out what to
Give yourself five minutes to write your succession plan. If you need to step down, who holds what? Five minutes is an intentionally short amount of time, so that you write the instinctive version of this plan rather than a galaxy-brained one.
Now imagine you and the team have no opportunity to plan, not even in this instinctive five-minute way. You take emergency leave, you’re unreachable, team’s gotta figure it out on their own. How would they arrange themselves?
Once you’ve done 1 and 2: ask how closely that arrangement from 2 matches the plan you spent five minutes writing in 1. Are the two plans 90% aligned? 40%?
Most leaders I run this with say something north of 80%. When that’s so, the thing they think they’re missing already exists. They have a strong brain trust in place and they may not be leaning on it enough to free up their strategic time and headspace.
If the percentage of alignment between the two plans is low, instead, you’ve got a different project on your hands. You likely have a capacity problem and the gaps between the two plans show you
The objection that comes next is always the same: my reports are already stretched, so I can’t hand them more. Which is fair, and mostly beside the point. What you’d be handing over isn’t more hours. It’s a higher tier of thinking about work they already touch.
-ben
One cool trick for scaling your culture
When your team is no longer a small ragtag group of founders, when you can see that you’ll soon be managing people who are managing people, you can have some very reasonable fear that your culture is going to fall apart. The special rhythm and vibe you and your co-founder friends have cultivated will get lost as your team becomes populated with newbies and strangers. You don’t want this to happen.
You also recognize that you’re just you. You can’t be everywhere, all the time, holding a cultural standard that others will intuitively understand and meet.
One of the cheapest, most useful things you can do is define your go-to moves. Make a list of the specific, observable behaviors that you and/or the most effective imaginable teammates do. These are behaviors you want to see scaled as the organization scales. If, at future date x, you can walk into any room and confidently expect to see these behaviors, you also expect that your team will be on track to achieve its mission.
We often call these behaviors, these default moves, these go-to’s “values” but that label can be distracting. It says too much and too little at the same time. These behaviors aren’t just “wholesome attitudes we’d prefer to see”; they’re also less grandiose and more concrete than “the most noble aspirations we hold for ourselves.”
You’re doing a good job identifying these behaviors if you can readily build a hiring process that screens for them and you can write a clear, data-informed performance review based on them and you can provide newcomers with clear illustrations of them from your team’s current work.
This list of ~5 behaviors, the most critical 5, is the path and the guardrails for scaling your culture.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Writer Matt Yglesias on threats to liberalism:
Liberalism is under threat, not just implicitly but increasingly overtly, as prominent politicians seek reputations as thought leaders explicitly by disavowing liberalism’s main elements.
Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., come from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have little overlap on specific public policy questions. But they both have new books out arguing that America has badly erred by overemphasizing individual freedom at the expense of some vision of “the common good.”
Songwriter John Darnielle on beliefs that sustained him:
This is me at nineteen: unable to tell anybody “no,” incapable of showing my naked face to the world, unhappy in my own skin, resentful of the real me still living under all the layers of hurt and anger — layers that stand in for me to the world, layers that then constitute my knowable self. I am alive today by grace, and because the wounded being at my core — the person I really was and am, the one I could not kill — believed in the magic of fragile things, in the holiness of thin ice, and because he held those beliefs strongly enough to fight back.
MIT professor John Maeda on motivating students:
My ten years of data as a professor show that giving students a seemingly insurmountable challenge is the best motivator to learn.