Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager

Delegation

Now that we’ve gotten our strategies for communicating well with our staff sorted, we’ll look at one of the most powerful tools that you have as a manager: delegation. Remember that as an engineer, you write the code and delegate the work to computers all the time. Being an effective manager involves learning how to do this with people. We’ll show you how.

Simply put, delegation is the transfer of responsibility for a task from yourself to a direct report. For example, if you’ve been asked to produce a report, then you can delegate that task to somebody on your team, and then when the work is finished, it can be given to the person that asked for it. All the while you can be doing something else. That’s delegation. It sounds simple, ...