Does delegation mostly go up or down your organisation? Seriously.
The art of effective delegation is perhaps the poor relation of management and leadership practice—not very exciting to study—but nevertheless very important.
So often, I meet leaders or even whole management teams who say they can’t delegate any more work because their team members are too busy already. And so they overload themselves and don’t have the capacity to take on the higher level—and perhaps unfamiliar—challenges they should taking on.
The thing is that’s really backwards: It means delegation flows up the organisation not down. If our people can’t handle any more work, it means they don’t have a big enough team or they’re not effective at delegating or need help with the task. The answer to that is to help them learn to delegate more effectively and perhaps find more people, not take on more work ourselves.
If we want to evolve and grow, we should be pushing work down the organisation not lifting it up, building strength in the team as required to make that possible.