Delegation and Reverse Delegation

I think that people don't think deeply enough about delegation. Here are the things that I think about.

• Don't just delegate things you don't want to do. It's tempting, but evil. Don't be evil.
• It doesn't matter if they'd do things the same way I would. It only matters that it will get done and be done to a quality that is acceptable.

When to delegate

I will delegate:

• Things where I'm incapable of doing the task/project. This is the easy one. After that it gets more complex.
• Things that I can do, if the person I'm delegating it to can also do it.
  • But I will only do this if there are other tasks that I need to do that they cannot.

When not to delegate

• When delegating work to the person would prevent them from doing work that I cannot do.

What do you mean reverse delegation?

This is when you delegate a task to your boss/spouse that they might want you to do. Here, you're delegating up the food chain. It will follow all of the other delegation rules I laid out, but people seem less willing to do it. Be bold. If you can explain the why, they should understand and agree.

Let me give you a concrete example.

There was a relatively small group of people in my company that would talk to customers when things went terribly wrong with our products. This requires an unusual collection of skills and there were a few people who were routinely brought into this discussions. I was one of them, but also my two-up boss was another one of them. In general, I would try to take as many of these as I could, so that he was freed up to do VP+ stuff. But, there was this one customer who was downright abusive. There is a limit to how much I can tolerate that before I say things that are detrimental to the business relationship. My boss had a higher tolerance for that than I did, so I "delegated" that customer to him.

This is "reverse delegation".