New leaders find it difficult to delegate their responsibilities to their team. A consequence of this is another challenge that leaders hardly notice and reduces their effectiveness. We call this ‘reverse delegation’.
Imagine you are the leader.
One of your team members drops by your desk and says ‘Boss, there is a problem’ and starts explaining the problem. In a few minutes, you realize that you are running late for your next meeting. You say, ‘Let me think about this and get back to you tomorrow’’. The team member leaves the desk expecting you to get back.
In another instance, you got an email from another team member asking you to provide your feedback on a document that she wants to share with stakeholders just to be sure you both are on the same page. You park that item in your To-Do list wanting to review it later.
Another day, a team member says that he is blocked since engineering isn’t on track with his project. He asks you to talk to the engineering manager. You promise to take the necessary steps to help him out.
Adding little more context – in all these examples, the tasks discussed are actually the team member’s direct responsibilities (solving a product problem, talking to the engineering manager etc).
But the team members ended up delegating their work to the leader. Unknowingly, the ball is now in the leader’s court. The leader has to now do the required work and update the team members instead of the other way around. This is why we term it ‘reverse delegation’.
The effect…
In a matter of days if not weeks, if left unchecked, more such work can get stacked on the leader’s To-Do list via reverse delegation. The leader ends up feeling overwhelmed by this list (in addition to his/her To-Dos from regular responsibilities) and misses the deadlines set by the team members.
Some team members start feeling that their boss has become a bottleneck and the nicer ones feel sorry for the boss since she has too many things to do and softly complain ‘She is always busy!’
Analysis & root cause…
A possible way to classify the tasks that a leader does for helping the team members –
a) Help sought by team members that are not part of their responsibilities
b) Mentoring team members
c) Reverse delegated tasks
For (a) & (b) – genuine help sought by the team members (where they are learnings or the required action is beyond their reach), a good approach is time-boxing the work rather than growing a large To-do list. Whenever the leader and the team member agree on taking a joint action/decision/intervention, they need to fix a time slot to address/discuss the same. This would avoid running with a never-ending To-do list. This would also make it clear that the problem is owned by the team member and not by the leader.
c) Reverse Delegation: An important root cause of excessive reverse delegation is the lack of empowerment of the team members. In the worst case, a leader wants to take every decision and as a consequence reverse delegation happens in excess.
Leaders need to empower the team to solve this. He/she needs to move from a point of view of ‘wait until I tell you to do ___’ to ‘make decisions on your own and periodically report/keep me informed’.
However, empowerment is not a quick win but a longer timeframe effort involving the following steps –
The leaders need to –
a) See the demerits of one’s inner need to control each decision
b) Develop the intent in the team members that they need to own their decisions (in case they don’t have the intent)
c) Help skill the team members to make those decisions (in case they don’t possess the required skills)
Happy empowering!
