ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m ADI IGNATIUS. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: So Adi, one thing that I think almost every leader struggles with is delegation, particularly if you have risen through the ranks because you have been a star performer in your field, a producer, someone who gets things done, it can feel really weird to start outsourcing that work, not even rote tasks, but also decision-making to others.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, we’ve written about this before and it’s absolutely key. First of all, nobody wants to work for a micromanager. Secondly, you can’t do it all. And I’m probably not a great delegator. There are things that I feel very strongly about the process, the way I do things. It’s hard for me to give that up. It’s hard for me to imagine that somebody else could do it as effectively and efficiently. So I’m not great in this area.
ALISON BEARD: So I’m going to push back on that, Adi, you were my editor-in-chief for 15 years, and I actually thought you did a great job of letting others have authority, responsibility, and trusting them to do their jobs.
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, I mean, that’s heartening to hear. I don’t think I am a classic micromanager, but I think there’s certain areas that I think, “Okay, this is my core strength. I’m really good at this. I’m going to hang onto it and do it myself.” And I think maybe sometimes that’s fine, but I think managers sometimes hold onto things too tightly for too long, which makes it hard for them to focus on what really, really matters.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I definitely identify with that. I think that I derive a lot of my self-worth and positivity about work in the things that I do really well, and I want to keep doing them and don’t want to hand them off. And that is one of the reasons that our guest today points to as to why so many people struggle with delegation.
Elsbeth Johnson is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and she’s identified four main reasons why people struggle to hand off work, but she also has advice on how we can overcome them and make sure that we are effectively managing our people, enabling their growth, and then freeing up our time for more strategic higher-level work. She wrote the HBR article, Why Aren’t I Better at Delegating? And here’s our conversation.
So I think we can all agree that delegation is essential to good management, but what does your research show about leader’s ability to actually do it well?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: So I guess there’s two problems. The first is they’re not always sure what type of work they should keep and what they should let go. And then the second problem is that even if they know the sort of work that they should be delegating more of, there’s four barriers that our research tells us that stop them doing that as effectively as they should.
ALISON BEARD: So I do want to go through each of those four roadblocks, but first just explain what the downsides of not delegating are, and do you find that that’s the same across sort of industries, leadership levels, functions?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: So there’s three big downsides. The first big downside is for the organizations and whoever funds them, which is those organizations are not making the most out of all of their human assets because frankly, they have got people who are too expensive, too senior, doing work that could be delegated to more junior and therefore cheaper people. So just in terms of a return on assets, it’s suboptimal.
Second problem is for the people who should be getting more senior, more interesting work delegated to them, they’re being denied the opportunity to grow, do more interesting work, develop, take on more responsibility. It’s their turn to shine and they’re not being given that opportunity.
The third problem is actually for leaders themselves, which is they are hoarding the work. And although that’s tempting to do, it actually means that they are crowding out from their own time, the time they should be to doing more interesting, more strategic work. So doing the strategic rather than the tactical, thinking about the long-term rather than doing the short-term urgent thing that’s right in front of them. So it can be very career constraining for the leaders themselves.
Now, in terms of which organizations, which sectors are disproportionately impacted by those three adverse outcomes, it massively impacts organizations that should be making higher margin. So the higher your margin, the more deleterious that impact is on both the organization and its ROI, on the more junior members of teams who want to take responsibility. And also on the leaders themselves.
ALISON BEARD: I imagine the larger the organization too, because if every manager is doing a poor job of delegating and you have a whole host of managers, then the problem is compounded.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: A hundred percent. The problem is compounded. And actually I was talking to a friend who was actually commenting on the article on LinkedIn, and he is currently in a startup with two people. And so his immediate question to himself was, “Well, how salient is this for me? Well, it’s less immediately salient, it’s costing you less in immediate terms, but there is still an opportunity cost for you doing too much.
So his immediate question was, “Which of the things am I currently doing on my task list, should I be giving to my lawyers? Should I be giving to my VC advisors? Which should I be giving to my board members?” Everybody has essentially an ecosystem around their organization, even when that organization only has two people on the payroll.
ALISON BEARD: How does a leader recognize when a failure to delegate is holding them back?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: So it’s a very good question, and sadly, I’m not sure that a lot of organizations, at least the ones that I work with, do a great job in giving leaders really timely feedback on exactly that point. But here are some of the symptoms of a leader who’s not delegating enough. If you come to year-end performance appraisals, you look at your succession plan and there just aren’t strong enough, plausible enough candidates on it, chances are that’s because you haven’t been essentially assessing those candidates by trying them out.
That’s a real red flag around maybe I haven’t been delegating enough for the past year. Equally, if you’ve got people leaving you, regretted leavers who are in their exit interviews saying things like, “Well, I just don’t feel like I’ve got a path to growth here, or I don’t feel like I’m getting as much responsibility as I feel able to take on.” Again, that can be a bit of a red flag on you as a leader.
Now very often the problem is that these red flags are kind of covered up in a lot of organizations because a lot of organizations reward people who do rather than who delegate. And that’s, I think particularly true in organizations, the professions is a good example. So law firms, the medical profession, where so-called producer managers are the model. In other words, a partner of a law firm, she still has clients, she’s still generating billable hours. She’s now also managing a team of other lawyers though who have their own clients and are generating their own billable hours. And so that producer manager model, the real question is what is truly recognized and rewarded by the organization? And I think for too many organizations, it is still that we recognize doing rather than delegating.
Whenever we’re asking leaders to do something differently, we also have to ask, “Well, why aren’t they?” Because actually they may be reacting perfectly rationally to the reward and recognition structure that the organization has put in front of them.
ALISON BEARD: And you mentioned the first problem that you confront is figuring out which tasks are delegatable. So there’s sort of the low-level tactical work obviously, but then some strategic work, like decision-making should also be handed off too. So how do you help leaders figure out what they should be giving up and what they shouldn’t?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: It’s a very good question, and it does depend on the nature of the work that a particular leader is doing in their particular organization. But we do come back to that test. Am I the best, cheapest person to do this work? And if I’m not, how do I get it to the best, cheapest person with enough context so that that person is set up to do that work just as brilliantly as I would do it?
So for example, that might well be not just a list of activities to do, basically, here’s my existing task list, please do it for me. It might be, I’m actually going to give you part of writing this year’s strategy. The demarcation between strategic and tactical is actually a little bit more nuanced. It’s not that leaders should keep all the strategy stuff for themselves and just delegate the shorter-term tactical stuff. It is actually that they should delegate anything where they don’t pass the better, cheaper test.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. So now let’s turn to those four main challenges that you talked about. First, you note that it feels really good to be personally productive, to actually get the work done, not oversee the work getting done. So how do you overcome that?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Look, it’s not easy because it’s chemical. I mean, high achievers are basically addicted to dopamine. And so part of it is actually just slightly weaning yourself off that dopamine addiction. But there are some hacks. The first is create different types of checklists. I personally, whenever I’m chairing a meeting, I write myself a little note and I put a little box next to it that I can tick. And next to the list is, “Have I set proper context for this meeting?” Which means clarifying why are we meeting, what am I hoping to achieve in the next 45 minutes?
How do I think we all need to show up to make that more likely? And then when I’ve done that context setting, I get to put a little tick in the box. So to some extent, we’re not even having to wean ourselves off our dopamine addiction, we’re just having to have a higher quality of dopamine addiction.
ALISON BEARD: So you’re giving yourself a pat on the back for managerial work basically.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: You absolutely are. But the other reason that there is a dopamine deficit when you first try to delegate more is actually that all of this context setting work, it’s not just less dopamine rich, it’s also actually cognitively heavy to do. And what we know about stuff that has a high cognitive load on the human brain is that there are some things that help with that. And so creating routines massively reduces the perception of cognitive load. And so one of the things again that I talk about in the article is leaders who create routine checklists, but also just routine questions that they use for quarterly business reviews or performance management conversations or coaching conversations.
Things like, what’s your biggest problem right now? How do you think you’re going to approach that? How would you like to progress? And if these become your standard routine questions, we know that that reduces the cognitive load. And when you reduce the cognitive load, you reduce the perception of there being a dopamine deficit.
ALISON BEARD: So the second problem that you identify is when employees come back to you asking for help. How does a leader deal with that and make sure that the work stays handed off?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: So this is really tricky. Some of the best leaders are most susceptible to this because for them, they really want to help their people. So really here it’s about understanding what constitutes help, because actually you don’t help people by making the decision for them, doing the work for them, that actually doesn’t build capability in them. It builds dependency on you. And so when we frame it for leaders in that way, that creates a bit of a light bulb moment, which is, “Oh wow, that’s the opposite of what I want. I don’t want my people to be dependent. I want them to shine.” Just reframing it in that way can help.
ALISON BEARD: I do have to say that I really struggle with that because oftentimes, especially in a deadline driven business, I sort of think to myself, “It’s just going to be easier if I do this myself,” instead of offering suggestions on how to do it or guidance on how to do it. So what’s your advice to someone who struggles with that like I do?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: The reality is at least in the short term, it will always be quicker. And so intellectually, you just need to know that this is going to require an investment of your time, of your coaching and teaching skills. But the practical advice is always the same: when someone comes to you and says, for example, “Which of these two clients should I prioritize?” Or, “We’re strapped for headcounts, so which of these two projects is a higher priority?”
You don’t help them by giving them the answer, you help them instead by resetting the context, which means, so let’s remember why we’re doing these two projects. Let’s remember what the outcomes should be of these two projects, and then giving the work back. So once you’ve reset the context, then saying, “So given that, what do you think the priority project or client should be?”
And the wonderful thing that happens at that point, not only does the leader get to walk away from that conversation having given the work back, but actually she also gets to really see the quality of the decision that that direct report can come to. Because for as long as the leader is making the decision, she doesn’t really know. As a result of that, she’s then even less likely to delegate because she’s delegating to an unknown quantity.
What I always say to leaders is, “Don’t let yourself off the hook. Those should be the exceptions, not the rule. So look for opportunities, plan the work, plan enough runway between when you give the work away and when the deadline is so that there are actually enough, so-called catches in that process so that someone can come back to you, not just once, but two or three times with a rewritten draft.” That massively increases the likelihood that you will actually successfully delegate and it not come back to you.
ALISON BEARD: And the end goal, if you’re a good boss, is to make sure that eventually that your team members can do it as quickly as you can.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: A hundred percent.
ALISON BEARD: And as well as you can.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: A hundred percent.
ALISON BEARD: So the third challenge is when leaders above you, maybe if it’s even the C-suite or the board, they expect you to be in the weeds on everything and know every detail of every project that you’re overseeing. So how do you handle that?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: As we say in the article, this is not when the problem is below you, it’s above you or indeed, your client. Okay? People to whom you are not used to saying no. And so this is basically fixable, but gradually. So we can’t expect bosses or clients to go cold turkey on our involvement. Again, we have got to help them get comfortable with us not being involved in the weeds.
So some little tactics, start on the smaller, less risky stuff, make it very clear to the boss or the client that you are still the ultimate owner of accountability. But that these team members, they’re actually all over the detail. And in fact, in some cases might be able to be much more responsive than you are. A good example of that is a banker with whom I worked a number of years ago, very senior, had a lot of clients. And as a result of that, if a client called her, she may well be on an airplane, in another meeting. As she delegated more and more of her work, the clients were actually saying, “Wow, not only is your team good, but they’re actually more responsive than you were able to be. This is actually great.”
Now again, a bit like the, you’ve got to choose your battles in dealing with a second issue. You’ve also got to recognize that when it comes to this third issue, the demands of bosses or clients, there’s going to be some bosses who just want you, at least for now, and there’s some clients who just want you, at least for now. And again, as long as you are able to deliver that and resource your team accordingly, in other words, pass the better, cheapest test, then that might be fine. And actually in organizations where you can use the pricing mechanism with clients, in other words, you can say, “Look, I’m a very expensive resource, but if you really want me at that meeting, I can absolutely be there. But it will cost you this.” And again, very often with professional services firms, management, consulting firms, law firms, that is exactly what they do. That’s what they use the pricing mechanism for.
ALISON BEARD: And I like the idea of saying, “Okay, you need me, but I’m also going to bring my number two, and maybe that will bring to you, next time you don’t need me because she’s going to do great.”
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Absolutely. And so the most important advice is you cannot just flick a switch and not be there. You have to, as I say, almost create a runway so that you have credible replacements for at least some of the time that you spend with your boss and with your clients.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, and then finally, you talk about how many of us have a limited definition of work in our minds. So what do you mean by that and how do we get over it?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Well, I don’t think we spontaneously just create this limited definition, although that’s exactly how to articulate it. I think very often this somewhat limited definition of work is given to us by our organizations, but it particularly afflicts the producer manager. And this is about getting over the fact that, look, in order to scale ourselves as individuals, we just have to accept that there is a limited amount of work that any individual can do, however expert and however unique.
And so this is really about having in some ways a more nuanced conversation with your organization. It’s about making sure that the people who are promoted want to be in positions of leadership, and we’re not just promoting the best technical people. In investment banking we very often refer to it as we promoted our best trader to be the head of desk, and then all of a sudden nobody’s happy.
The best trader is no longer trading, he’s running a desk. The people on the desk are not happy because they’re being managed by someone who doesn’t want the job and probably isn’t very good at it, and the organization isn’t happy because the resulting dynamic isn’t working. So I think we just have to have more sophisticated conversations about succession, about leadership pipelines.
But I think we also do need just to recognize that sometimes there are going to be producer managers who don’t want to lead, and we need to find roles that are properly recognized, properly remunerated as well for those people. That’s particularly true in the professions, in sectors that have deep technical expertise and where that deep technical expertise is the source of value for the organization and its customers or clients. So I think this one is trickier because it requires the organization to think differently, not just the individual.
ALISON BEARD: So what happens if you try all of these things, but then your team just really isn’t good enough? They’re not doing the work to your standards. You need a new team?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Well, you do need a new team. I think that’s right. So there’s two problems that none of this attempt at delegation will survive. The first is what we term structural under-resourcing. That is when there just aren’t enough bums on seats or machines in the value chain.
In other words, you are under-resourced regardless of the capability of those resources. So you need to fix that. That is a fundamental structural fix and a conversation that you need to have with your organization. It’s really though only when you try to delegate and to give the accountability for the work to these other people that honestly you start to develop a true sense of how capable these people are.
Because if you are still underwriting all of their decisions by making those decisions for them, then you don’t really know. So the sequence of work here is really this, make sure you have enough resources. Then try to delegate by overcoming the four challenges that we talk about in the article.
ALISON BEARD: And be patient with it, right?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: And be patient with it. Give that time. If as a result of doing that work, you realize some of your team, and it’s usually not all of your team, but some of your team are just not good enough even for the role they’re currently in, let alone for a promoted role, then you need to act accordingly. Now, the good news is that typically we see a bell curve, right? Life’s a bell curve. We see very often some people who just run at this opportunity, they’re like, “Oh my God, thank goodness you’re delegating more because I’m ready.” And very often those people actually are surprising to leaders, surprising on the upside.
And then there’ll be the middle part who are still a bit hesitant, not sure you are serious, maybe thinking they’ll just wait you out. So be patient, be consistent. And then you’ve got the people who really aren’t good enough and never were. It’s just now that you know. So better to know than not know and take action accordingly.
ALISON BEARD: If you’re running a whole organization, say, I’m the CEO, or I’m a C-suite leader who’s managing a very large team, how do I tell if the managers under me are struggling to delegate and how do I bring them up to speed?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: We talked a bit earlier about the red flags. The problem with those red flags is that they very often come too late in the process. If a star is leaving, it’s kind of too late to start saying to their leader, “Look, you need to delegate more.” So my best advice on that is to design and roll out a bespoke 360, a 360 survey. So getting upward, peer and downward feedback, which says to the organization, “How well is Alison delegating? How is Alison making available opportunities for you to do more interesting work and take on more responsibility?”
And I say bespoke just because a lot of people buy a kind of 360 off the shelf and then say, “Oh, it doesn’t really work for my business.” Okay, well, don’t do that then. Make it work for your business. Draft it yourself to really be tailored to the business challenges and the profit drivers of your particular organization.
But a 360 is the best way to get timely feedback up to the C-suite on the extent to which every level of the organization is delegating. And that’s a very important point. This isn’t just senior leaders being asked to delegate to more junior leaders. It’s all the way down. Otherwise, the risk is you get this kind of squeezed middle.
And so the point about the test is that everybody should be asking themselves, “Am I the best, cheapest person to do this work?” All the way down. And that is what enables us to deliver this wonderful thing that we call operational leverage, which is where everybody in the organization is doing the most value-adding work they can do without compromising quality. And if you achieve that, then actually everybody’s pretty happy. But also the people who are really happy are your funders because you’re really delivering ROI at that point.
ALISON BEARD: And it sounds like if you identify problems, there’s training that can be done for managers, but then also there are policy changes that you can make organization-wide to make it clear that you’re incentivizing this kind of behavior.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Absolutely. I mean, it’s not fair to hold people accountable for leadership behaviors or having certain skills, and that’s what we’re talking about here, without clarifying, that that is your expectation of them. So for organizations, C-suite, particularly the HR teams, it’s clarify that these are the expectations of leaders and managers, people all the way down the organization. Then give them the tools, the training, the techniques to help them build the capability to do this. Then assess whether they’re doing it. That’s the point about the bespoke 360. And then recognize and reward them for having done it, make it a promotion criteria that you’ve built a plausible bench to whom you could delegate more and who could actually take your job when you get promoted. And so that whole system of the organization is what we’re really talking about at that stage.
ALISON BEARD: And do you expect organizations to start thinking about agentic AI in that way too? That part of leaders’ goals will be to figure out how to delegate more to machines?
ELSBETH JOHNSON:
I really do. I mean, slightly depressingly, some of the organizations that I have been talking to in the last month or so, their definition of using agentic AI is kind of, well, I’ve got Copilot and so I’m using it more.
But I do think we need to get a, what I would say is a kind of higher level of almost general knowledge about what both generative and then agentic AI can do for us. Now I don’t think it has to be much more than is currently provided by some of the better tools that are currently available. We don’t need new frontier-breaking technology to do this.
We just need to know, for example, just how do you write a good prompt? Just knowing the fact that you put a learning loop question at the end of every prompt can help you generate rather a ton more in terms of quality of answers. Equally, knowing that there are some things that humans are never going to be, or at least not right now, replaced by. So in other words, for me, the use of generative or agentic AI actually just refracts the test question even more, which is, am I the best, cheapest thing to do this work? And when that thing could be a person, but also could be a non-human, I think that becomes very interesting.
ALISON BEARD: Just one last piece of advice. So I’m a leader who wants to get better at delegating after listening to this show. What should I do tomorrow? I walk into the office or I walk into whatever workplace I’m in, what can I do? Is the immediate first step just finding a task to delegate or talking to my team about what they might want to do?
ELSBETH JOHNSON: So I don’t think it’s talking to your team about what they’ll want to do. I actually think it starts with you. I think the first thing you do is you do a bit of an audit. What work am I currently doing? What meetings am I currently going to? And what do I do in those meetings? What is the unique contribution that I make? Because remember, you are always looking for to keep hold of the work, the meetings, the email, the projects, the clients for whom you are the best, cheapest person. So you’re trying to isolate that and then give as much of the other work away.
So the first tip is audit your current workload and how you are currently using your time. Then drop a list of what you could give away and who you think would be best placed to receive it. Do a list of your current direct reports or people available to you more widely in the organization.
And then think, which of these pieces of work would suit each of these people playing to their strengths, given what I know about them and the sort of work that they find interesting, how I think that they might need to be stretched or personally developed. And so what you are looking to do is to fit the work and the person rather than just randomly giving it out to people. And then you need to find time in your diary to essentially run learning loops on how well that delegation has worked for the outcome that the work was aiming to deliver, for the person who you delegated to and also for you. And so if you do those things in the next two or three weeks, that’s a brilliant place to start.
ALISON BEARD: Great. Well, Elsbeth, thank you so much for helping us get better at delegating. I really appreciate you coming.
ELSBETH JOHNSON: Thank you so much.
ALISON BEARD: That was Elsbeth Johnson, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She wrote the HBR article, “Why Aren’t I Better at Delegating? Next week, Adi looks at the way fake news could affect your organization and how to defend against it.
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Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist, Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
