The Devil's Advocate

74

Don’t delegate – abdicate

Very few people are natural delegators. To most managers, ‘delegation’ is a matter of taking a large stack of folders and dumping it on a subordinate’s desk.

Real delegation is about giving someone sufficient authority to cock things up. And that responsibility is something you have to prise out of a manager’s fingers like the still-smoking gun from a gunslinger’s cold, dead fingers.

I speak as a terrible delegator. My worst examples are in customer meetings where a colleague is doing a presentation and I suddenly cut across them to make a correction. I might have said, ‘In fact, we can deliver in three weeks,’ but what the client hears is ‘I don’t trust my staff,’ and the employee hears ‘I don’t pay you to have ...