Delegate, delegate, delegate (58)

Am I the bottleneck?

Why bother with delegating tasks? The simple answer is to get work done.

Delegating tasks is all about giving to your team a free pass to solve a problem the way they see fit. Instead of defining methods or solution, only the destination is defined.

This is not only perfect at decreasing the managers workload and letting them think strategically, but more crucially it is oxygen for the team. With clear task delegation, they can have the autonomy to fill in the gaps and grow. No need to wait for when the manager will have time to make a decision and move forward and no complete stops when the management team is busy or on holidays.

Scope creep

Still, it’s hard to let go. Engineers are trained to optimize, to make things efficient. In the early days of a career and within the context of small teams, this mindset thrives. Team leads still write code, pair with colleagues, and drive decisions closely. These are often hands-on managers.

But when the team grows from 2 to 22, and the product becomes more complex, that approach stops working. You hire experts to do the thinking, but stepping back can feel like giving up control. Especially when performance reviews focus on visible impact, and when “value” still often means something you can point to on a roadmap or pull request.

(This often happens at start-ups or when an organization is undergoing through change by the way.)

The setting is rigged against us

To make things harder, most managers are never formally trained to manage. In tech, the typical path to management begins with high performers being promoted. They excel at the technical work, and suddenly they’re responsible for people.

Sometimes companies provide coaching or crash courses to fill the gap. But even then, many organizations still evaluate managers based on alignment with upper management, not by the success or morale of their teams.

This creates a system where doing feels safer than delegating. Where control feels like competence. And where stepping back can feel like fading out. Add to that an element of physical distance between management and workers (different offices or different countries even due to out-sourcing or acquisition) and following Conway's law you have a recipe for information hoarding and decisions behind closed doors.

It was always all about trust

Ultimately, the only way through this is trust. Trust that your team is capable. Letting others lead is part of the job, not a failure to do it. This makes people want to commit and excel and ultimately establish a growth-minded environment. Something like a gardener-leader, if you will ;)

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