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delegation

Also called: delegating

Handing a piece of work, together with the authority it needs, to someone else while keeping responsibility for the result. Done well, it frees the lead's time and grows the person; done as dumping, it does neither.

Delegation is handing a piece of work, together with the authority it needs, to someone else while the lead stays accountable for the result. It differs from dumping, where only the dull work moves and the context and decision rights stay behind, and from abdication, where the work moves and nobody looks at it again. Done well it frees the lead's time for work only the lead can do, and it grows the person who takes the work on.

New leads, especially those promoted from inside, tend to under-delegate. Doing it yourself is faster today, mistakes feel personal, and being the best specialist was the reason for the promotion. The cost arrives later: the lead becomes the bottleneck, the team stops learning, and asking the lead becomes the fastest route for every hard question, which makes the bottleneck worse.

Good delegation has a few working parts: pick the person by their experience with this task, write a short brief (outcome and why, limits, what they decide alone, resources, check-ins, what "done" means), agree the level of freedom, and check in early and briefly. When a draft is off, point to the gap and let the person fix it; taking the work back on a busy day teaches everyone that the hand-over wasn't real. The same logic applies to AI assistants: you can hand them drafting, never accountability, and every output still needs a person who reads it.

Example

Klasna's spring forecast for Support (1 March – 30 May 2027) has 325 hard tickets in 13 weeks. At about an hour each, a lead who keeps taking them all spends 325 hours on them. In the peak week of 17 May there are 33 hard tickets: 33 hours, or 33 ÷ 40 = 82.50% of a 40-hour week. The lead's target week has 8 hours of own tickets, about 17 tickets, so the rest has to go somewhere.

Six months of data say where. Bohdan solved 160 video-failure tickets, handed up only 2 (160 ÷ 162 = 98.77% solo) and 1.88% were reopened, so from 8 March he owns video failures. Olha solved 210 of the team's 355 refund requests (210 ÷ 355 = 59.15%), so she decides refund exceptions inside the policy. Maryna writes the quick-answer guide for the two seasonal coordinators, with three hours off the queue that week and a 15-minute look at her draft on Wednesday.

When her draft quotes last year's refund deadline, the lead doesn't rewrite it at night: the lead points to the current policy, Maryna fixes it, and Olha checks that section first. To Iryna, the mistake is still the lead's to own: "we found it on Wednesday and fixed it".

Common mistakes

  • Delegating only the dull work. Moving tasks without context or decision rights is dumping; people notice the difference.
  • "Could you handle it?" A hopeful sentence isn't delegation; the follow-up questions in the chat are the brief you didn't write.
  • Taking it back on a busy day. Rewriting someone's draft overnight teaches the whole team your hand-overs aren't real.
  • Passing on the blame. Accountability stays with the lead: "we found it and fixed it", never "they made a mistake".
  • Adding without removing. In a busy season, delegated work on top of a full week is overload; when something goes in, something comes out.

Learn it in the course

  • The delegation brief · Outcome, limits, decision rights, resources, check-ins and what "done" means, for a person and for an AI draft assistant; the result stays yours.
  • Case: ticket ownership, Olha and Taras · One refund ticket, two answers to a family and two rules that both claim it. Find the structural cause, run the conversations and write the rule.
  • Case: splitting the spring peak · Read the peak forecast, close the gap without taking the hard tickets yourself, and write the split plan with delegation briefs for four coordinators, two seasonal hires and an AI draft assistant.