Active delegation

The first few months of 2022 hadn't been the easiest for me. I am suffering the consequences of poor delegation.

For context, 2021 was the first time I hired in middle managers and leaders to take over some of the engineering leadership work that I had been holding for the past 6 years. I was simultaneously relieved but also nervous. In my experience, it's impossible to get such major transitions right the first time around - too many habits to change, and too many unknown unknowns.

As I'd predicted, or perhaps because of that prediction, I either didn't delegate enough, or delegated poorly. This was compounded by poor hiring choices on my part, which muddied the causes of poor outcomes even further. 1 thing is clear from the feedback from my team and my own observations - I'm bottlenecking our execution, the rest of the team isn't exercising enough judgement, and execution outcomes are wanting.

As with most matters in my entrepreneurship life, there isn't a playbook that applies directly to my situation, but there are always frameworks distilled by clear thinkers who were also doers. By serendipity, once I recognised poor delegation to be a root cause, I chanced upon this tweet about radical delegation - https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1401598910792011776.

That helped me decide what to delegate. A related article taught me how to delegate -https://profitfactory.com/360delegation/.

Now, I just need to ask myself a question during my weekly planning session.

"How am I holding my team back, and how can I delegate?"