Let us feed you
Photo by Xavi Cabrera.
There's a guy we know in Toronto who is now sort of a big deal restauranteur. But back when we met him, he was working in a neighbourhood spot. And we were two hungry people who were far too tired to make any decisions about dinner.
The kind of hungry + tired combination where even the question, "what are you in the mood to eat?" is a confrontation. It was in this state that we passed a chalkboard sign in front of a restaurant we'd never visited. In large letters, it said, "Let Us Feed You."
Chalkboard signs outside restaurants shouldn't make you want to cry, but this one did. So deep was the relief of someone else taking on this Herculean task. We sat down. Our server had three questions.
How hungry are you?
Do you have any food allergies?
Is there anything you straight up don't like or don't feel like eating tonight?
And then, like magic, dish after delicious dish made its way to our table. Without us placing an order or ever seeing a menu. Even though that restaurant doesn't exist anymore, the experience has stuck with us.
We showed up with an important and urgent thing that needed to get done. We were both well beyond our own capacity to do it. We brought in help. Outlined what was important. And got to an amazing outcome. One that far surpassed our hopes for a single well-placed chalkboard.
If you take it out of the food example and into the workplace, you can see it. That thing we experienced as magic wasn't magic at all. It was incredibly well-designed delegation.
Bosses everywhere struggle with delegation. It's often faster to do things ourselves. We try to hand things off, only to have them boomerang back to us. Whereupon we have to redo the thing but now on a tighter deadline. For many bosses, we have a list of reasons why delegation is a thing we know we ought to do. And an equally long list of the times it's gone poorly.
Outside of work, the very same leaders who struggle with delegation are doing it all the time. From haircuts to restaurants to taxis. It's not that they never get a disappointing haircut or meal or ride, it's that the experience is a lot less charged. Those non-work hand-offs are hiding a secret, one that can help unlock the work ones.
The hand-off
The standard story about delegation is that work is an object. It's a relay baton. Or a football. Or a piece of Lego. The idea is that, as you grow in an organization, you end up holding more and more of these objects. And once you have too many, you start to feel overwhelmed. You become a bottleneck to your organization because you can't hold any more things. Everyone starts to use circus words to describe you. "You're juggling so much." "You're keeping so many plates spinning."
It seems like a good metaphor. It's clean and easy to understand. It appeals to our physical intuition and our experience of what it's like to carry too many things at once. It's very relatable and real.
But we talk about delegation with bosses a lot. And what we hear more than anything else is that they've tried giving things away, and it doesn't work.
The metaphor is the problem. Your work isn't footballs, or batons, or legos. And it's gonna trip you up to pretend that it is.
Sometimes you fumble the hand-off
One reason this model lets you down is that it makes handing off sound simple, but hand-offs are actually quite complex.
For any interesting piece of work, you carry a lot of context, experience, and expectations. Those things took time to get themselves into your head. But now that they're in there they feel like common sense. Well, they aren't. In our experience, most managers under-invest in the up-front time it takes to really lay out what's involved in a new request.
Why is this work important? Why are you delegating it instead of shelving it? (And are you sure we shouldn't just kill it?) Why now, and why to this person? What are the things that will sabotage this project if you're not careful? What will make this project a shining success? Who has which details that they care about, and how can you avoid doing five unnecessary rounds of revisions?
Doing the work to package that up and talk through it is the bare minimum for delegation to work. A lot of leaders try to shortcut this with phrases like, "Figure out what needs doing and do it." They might even play on your insecurities. "I can't spoon feed all of this to you, just take ownership and get it done." Don't buy it. A leader who expects to give away accountability without context or expectations is lazy, incompetent, or both.
But while packaging it up is necessary, it's often not sufficient.
Sometimes the hand-off is a lie
The other reason why this story doesn't work is that often the whole idea of a hand-off is bullshit. Even when you've had a good talk about expectations up front. Even with a shared definition of success.
It's just actually quite rare at work that you can be on the hook for something one day, and then utterly detached from it the next. And when you pretend that that can happen, maybe in service of "letting them sink or swim," you'll find you're often diving in to rescue them and ending up all wet.
The thing that our restaurant got right that companies often get wrong is that delegation usually isn't a hand-off. It's a partnership.
When we sat down in that restaurant, we felt like we had nothing left in the tank, no decisions left to make. "Let us feed you" was the most perfect 4 words they could have written. We wanted to delegate everything to the staff. Just take ownership and get it done. But if our server hadn't asked about hunger level or food preferences, our experience would have been worse. If they hadn't asked about allergies our experience would have been much worse.
They took on work — important work, work that we valued but didn't have the capacity to do — but they didn't pretend that they could do it in isolation. They didn't take 100% of it off our plate (ha!), but they did take 90%. And that felt better than them taking 100% and bringing us something we'd have to send back.
Delegation fails at work when the hand-off is incomplete, and also when the hand-off is too complete. And once you know that, you can get better at this fast.
If you're delegating something, do your homework on packaging up context and expectations. Sit down with the person to walk it through. But also be clear about which pieces you're keeping. Approvals? Accountability to the board? Fighting for resources with other teams? Your person gets all the same trust and visibility and opportunity to grow, but they also feel supported and clear on their part.
And if someone's delegating to you, ask questions until you get some answers. On expectations, on outcomes, and on which pieces they're holding on to. Tell them we said they have to tell you.
- Melissa and Johnathan