The delegation brief

Delegation means handing over a piece of work together with the authority it needs: the decisions the person may make, the resources and the access. Handing over only the work, while keeping every decision, isn't delegation; it's asking someone to do the typing while you still do the thinking.

Why it matters now: at Klasna the March peak has begun, and the lead's list keeps growing: a quick-answer guide for the two new coordinators, a refund playbook, a pilot of an AI draft assistant. One person can't do it all, and Your output is now the team's output already showed what happens when the lead tries: the team stalls.

Delegation is also how people grow. Each piece of work handed over with real authority is practice the person wouldn't get otherwise.

Match authority to the task. An outcome with no rights to deliver it sets the person up to fail; rights with no clear outcome invite drift. The rest of the lesson shows how to write both down.

“Could you handle this?” feels like delegation, but it's only a hopeful sentence. It names a task and leaves everything else to guesswork: what it's for, how big, by when, and what the person may decide.

At Klasna you asked Maryna: “Could you handle the guide for Dmytro and Sofiia?” She said yes, then asked four questions in the chat. How long should it be? By when? Which topics? Can she change the policy wording?

Her questions were the brief you didn't write. They aren't a sign she isn't ready, quite the opposite: she took the task seriously enough to want its edges. The chat isn't the problem either, and neither is her being quiet.

The cost of a missing brief is real. Either the person asks, as Maryna did, and the lead answers piecemeal over days, or the person doesn't ask and guesses, and the work comes back different from what was needed. Both are slower than writing half a page at the start.

A delegation brief fits on half a page and answers six questions the person would otherwise have to ask:

1. Outcome and why: what should be true at the end, and why it matters.
2. Limits: size, deadline, rules that can't change.
3. Decision rights: what the person decides alone, and where other decisions go.
4. Resources: time, data, people.
5. Check-ins: when you'll look together.
6. Done: how both of you will know it's finished.

Maryna's brief at Klasna. Outcome: by week 3, Dmytro and Sofiia answer the five most common exam-season questions without handing them up. Limits: two pages, ready by Friday 5 March, current policies only. Decisions: she chooses topics, structure and wording; policy changes go to Olha within the refund policy, to Iryna outside it. Resources: three hours off the queue and last month's tickets. Check-in: 15 minutes on her draft on Wednesday. Done: Olha has checked the refund part, and both new coordinators have used it on real tickets.

Delegating the work doesn't delegate the accountability. Responsibility for doing the work can be shared; accountability for the result stays with the lead.

At Klasna: if Maryna's guide has a mistake and a family gets a wrong answer, whose fault is it? To Iryna, yours. You chose the person, wrote the brief and set the check-ins. Inside the team, you and Maryna fix it together and adjust the brief.

Iryna puts it plainly: she doesn't want to hear “Maryna made a mistake”. She wants “we found it on Wednesday and fixed it”.

Two things follow. First, a lead never blames a report upward for delegated work; that teaches the whole team that taking on work is risky. Second, the lead has a real stake in setting things up well: a clear brief, the right person, and check-ins early enough to catch problems while they're cheap.

Accountability isn't a reason to hold on to everything. It's a reason to delegate carefully.

Because the result stays yours, the check-in is your main protection, and its timing matters more than its length.

Early: look at a draft well before the deadline, while a correction is still cheap. Short: fifteen minutes on the work itself, not a status meeting. At Klasna, Maryna's guide is due on Friday 5 March, so the check-in is a 15-minute look at her draft on Wednesday. A draft on Wednesday costs 15 minutes; a wrong answer found in April costs families.

Ask the people who'll check the work for a sensible slot too. Olha agrees to review the refund part, with one request: tell her Wednesday, not Friday at six.

Two common mistakes sit at opposite ends. Only a final review on the deadline day leaves no time to fix anything. Daily reviews of every paragraph take the work back in small pieces and tell the person the brief wasn't real.

One or two planned check-ins, written in the brief, are usually enough.

A tool you hand work to needs a brief too, with the same six lines and sharper limits, because a tool can't be accountable for anything.

At Klasna, Iryna wants an AI draft assistant piloted in the peak. Its brief: the assistant only drafts; a coordinator reads, edits and sends every reply. It never promises a refund or quotes a price it can't see in the account. It decides nothing. Outcome: faster replies on routine tickets (schedule changes and payment questions) with no rise in reopens. Check-in: read twenty sent replies each Friday. Done for the pilot: four weeks of data on speed and reopens, plus the team's view.

Two lines never belong in such a brief. Letting the tool approve money, even small refunds, hands a decision to something that can't answer for it. And measuring people instead of the pilot, such as tracking each coordinator's typing speed, is surveillance dressed up as evaluation.

Involve the sceptics. Olha expects Bohdan to hate it; ask him to help write the limits. Nobody knows better what a draft must never say.

The check-in exists to catch problems early while the work stays with the person. What you do when you find one decides whether your briefs are real.

At Klasna, Wednesday: Maryna's draft covers schedule changes and package balances well, but the refund section quotes last year's deadline. The temptation: rewrite that part yourself tonight; it's faster.

Faster tonight, slower all spring. Take the work back once and she learns your briefs aren't real: next time she'll wait for you to fix things instead of owning them. Handing the section to Olha does the same. Saying nothing until Friday wastes the cheapest moment to fix it.

So: point to the current policy, let Maryna fix it, and ask Olha to check that section first.

It's the lesson from February's rotation again, in Feedback going up: your blind spots: decision rights taken back on a busy day were never really handed over.

It's tempting to skip the brief for an expert: they know the work better than you, and a brief might feel like an insult. But a brief isn't a set of instructions. It's an agreement about the edges: the outcome, what the person decides alone, the limits and when you'll look together.

At Klasna, from 8 March you want Bohdan to own the video-failure tickets: a lesson lost to a video problem, and what the family gets for it. He knows those better than anyone. He still needs to know what “owning” means: which outcome counts, which credits he grants alone, where the limit sits and who decides above it. Olha's warning belongs in the brief: write the refund limit clearly, because video credits are where money leaves.

So an expert's brief is shorter on how and just as clear on what, who decides and when.

How it fits together: delegation hands over work with authority; a six-line brief makes it real; the result stays yours, so check early and don't take the work back. The next lesson asks how much freedom each person should get on each kind of task.