Leadership Superpower: Delegation
It was the start of year. I had burnt out for the second time in 3 months and I was totally spent. I resolved then to never get to that point again. Part of that sparked my string view that delegation is a superpower for leaders.
Among other things (a calendar audit, energy tracking) I started taking delegation seriously as a skill. That taught me a ton. Here are three things I learned:
Why delegation matters for leaders: getting more done, growing your team, and protecting your energy.
The three types of delegation.
How to actually start now.
Delegation is a Superpower for ALL leaders
For too long I put delegation in the bucket of “fancy names for stuff that other people do”. Having burnt out in a fast-growing, fast-paced FinTech for the second time, I changed my mind. Effective delegation changed how I thought about three things:
How I could achieve more myself.
How I could develop the people around me.
How I could stop burning out and hold a good pace.
Achieving more myself
Delegation can drastically improve what you get done in a day, a week, a month. That’s because before you delegate anything, you really consider how important and how urgent a task is.
When I started doing it properly, it forced me to ask whether things seemed important just because they were on my to-do list, or whether they were actually important. It also made me learn the skills of my team and choose what mattered (speed, skills development, quality), and learn more about what I was good at by comparison. Over time that made me and my team more efficient.
The biggest side-effect of thinking about delegation was that our efficiency climbed as prioritisation got clearer, work was better defined, and skills were combined.
Developing the team
Did you know development opportunities are the single largest reason people leave their roles?
Delegation gets the most important work done efficiently, and it develops your people at the same time.
Once I started asking what a task needed, I also started asking who could do it. That added a layer to development conversations, on both strengths and gaps. I began having discussions like “I think you’d be great to take this on, you’re really strong with X and Y and I know you’ll be able to handle Z”, and “this is a great chance for you to work on Z, I can pair with you to help, but it would be great if you took accountability for it”.
It made for better conversations about strengths and skills with my immediate team.
Halting burnout
Building a map of what I should focus on, what to delegate, and what to pair on forced me to change how I managed my own energy.
Delegation is setting clear expectations and agreeing the outcome. It takes more than a Slack message: it takes care and patience. Once it was done, though, I was free to focus on the work that was right for my development, and I found that energising.
It stopped feeling overwhelming and started to feel like a way to stop running myself empty again.
There are Three Main Types of Delegation
As I worked with my team on delegation, we started to explore how to set expectations and agree goals together. That led me to a realisation: there are three types of delegation, and you can use all three to start.
Straight Up Delegation: working within someone’s abilities.
Pairing Delegation: work that needs the two of you.
Development Delegation: work on the edge of their ability.
In each, Alignment and Expectation play important but different roles.
Straight Up Delegation: Working Within Someone’s Abilities
I started here: delegating work that sat within someone’s competency.
We talked through what I was responsible for and found projects and tasks they had the skills for. Here, Alignment mattered more than Expectation.
That first conversation is the important one. It sets up the right alignment on the shape of the work. The points I’d use to talk someone through it:
Why is this work important?
What’s the wider context?
How does it fit the larger goals?
What and who relies on it?
What are the constraints?
When does it need to be done?
Why then?
Once we’d aligned on the goals, context, and constraints, we moved on to support. I’d ask “how can I best support you on this?” and we’d talk about:
How to share progress.
The format and schedule of check-ins, formal and informal.
What role was best for me to play.
Pairing Delegation: Work That Needs the Two of You
BEWARE. This one is tricky, and I got stuck on it plenty of times. This is where micro-management creeps in.
I found that some work needed something from me without me actually doing it. Context, knowledge, sometimes (more often than I’d like to admit) skill. Here, Alignment to the overall goal mattered, and so did Expectation Setting. To get this right, we’d usually focus on these topics:
Why pairing will work here (who brings what, why work together rather than hand it over).
How we’ll collaborate (async updates, sync sessions, Miro, slides, docs).
Who owns what (structure vs detail, narrative vs depth, tech vs organisational).
What happens next (if there’s a presentation or session after, who goes, who presents what, who takes it forward).
Development Delegation: On the Edge of Their Ability
This is my favourite type of delegation. Done right, it builds a real culture of learning.
Here, Expectation Setting matters more than Alignment.
The first conversation is again the important one: name it clearly as a chance to take on something new (remember, development opportunities are the single biggest reason people leave). Focus on the skill being developed, how the task will help, and why it matters to where they want to go.
You’ll need a more regular check-in with them, and the emphasis is on learning. The management I’d do here looks much more like coaching. Questions like:
What have you learned so far?
What does that tell you about what to do next?
What’s the next challenge?
Who can help with that?
How can I support you?
How to Get Started on Delegation as a Skill
Some quick ways to apply this:
Create shared context with your team about developing delegation as a skill, and why it matters for all of you (share this piece if it helps).
List your focus areas (if you’re not sure, look at your to-do list, your calendar, or ask your stakeholders and manager).
Share the list with your team, and be clear the goal is to achieve more together.
Sort the work into the three types above.
Start the delegation conversations.
Iterate.
How you can tell if your delegation is working
The clearest sign is what your 1:1s have turned into.
When delegation is working, your 1:1s are problem-solving sessions. People come with a problem they already own and are already working, and they want a thinking partner to get further with it. You talk through the trickiest bits, and you leave without anything new on your list.
When it’s slipping, that dynamic reverses. The 1:1 becomes a problem-collection session. People bring you problems to hand over, you agree to “help”, and you walk away with a set of tasks added to your list.
The biggest “tell” is my list at the end of a 1:1. If I’m leaving with someone else’s tasks on it, something has drifted.
When it starts to happen, I ask a question, at any point in the conversation: “what’s the best outcome from this conversation?” It slows everything down. It gives us both a moment to check what we’re actually trying to get to, and it pushes the intention back to “help me solve my problem” rather than “take my problem off me.”
When your 1:1s start collecting problems again, I’ve found it’s the fastest way to turn them back into places where problems get solved.
Conclusion
There was a time when I couldn’t picture a year without burning out. Taking delegation seriously did more to change that than the calendar audits or the energy tracking I ran alongside it. If you want the same, don’t try to fix it all at once. Have one delegation conversation this week, with one person, and build from there.