The Art of Leadership

Chapter 11. Delegate Until It Hurts

I have this list. It’s a list of leadership merit badges. You acquire one of these badges when you complete a task that requires significant leadership. Acquiring the badge is the least important thing. The most important thing is that you discover the lesson that awards it.

As you might expect from the structure of this book, there are three classes of badges: ones earned from the tactics of being a manager, ones earned from your strategic stylings as a director, and, finally, the slippery merit badges associated with your visionary quest as an executive.

Where can you find the complete list of merit badges? Sorry, that’s another book. For now, here at the beginning of Act II, I’m just going to tell you about one of them. It’s the most important leadership merit badge, regardless of role: Delegation.

Entrust

Let’s start with a definition. Delegate. Verb. Entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself. The key word in that definition is “entrust,” but before we unpack that let’s first step back in time to those heady first days as a manager.

Perhaps the most confusing part of the early days of leadership is the shift in responsibility. You had something that you were responsible for: an area, a feature, a technology…but now it’s more. Your responsibility encompasses all of the responsibilities of all the folks on your team. As I wrote in Chapter 9, your instinct in these early days is that ...