In my book Great CEOs are Lazy, I discussed the power of using the 70% rule when delegating tasks to your employees. I also discussed how you need to assess the critical nature of an issue – whether it’s below the waterline or not – when delegating.
But there’s another framework within which we’ve had great success in helping leaders, and their direct reports agree on how issues are delegated daily.
Rather than thinking of delegation as a binary issue – either you delegate or don’t – consider what it might look like on a sliding scale, where a leader might delegate more responsibility over time as he or she begins to trust the competency level of their direct report.
We can break this down into five distinct stages of delegation.
There’s a beginning stage, Level 0, where no delegation of responsibility exists. This is when a business is run by the “do what I say” rule, and there is no authority or decision-making beyond the leader. If you’re reading this, we can assume you want to move past this stage.
At Level 1, delegation involves asking a subordinate to investigate an issue or decision initially. The goal is for the employee to come to their manager and explain what they learned and what potential decision options might be. The manager can then choose from those options as they ultimately decide.
Delegation Level 2 extends the degree of autonomy. Here, the employee researches the issue and decides on a course of action. However, the manager still reserves the right to approve or reject that action. There is still an approval process in place.
Level 3 operates more as an opt-out model than an opt-in version. What I mean by this is that the subordinate makes the call on what the course of action should be within a certain timeframe. That might involve, for instance, a case in which a manager tells an employee to proceed with their plan unless they hear from their boss in the next 24 hours. If they haven’t heard anything, they are cleared to proceed.
Level 4 takes the degree of delegation up another notch by making the decision retrospective: the manager asks the employees to tell them what they did after the action has already been taken. This evolves from an approval mode of delegation to an informational mode.
Level 5 is where you have finally reached total delegation. This is where a manager doesn’t even want to know what decision was made or why, because they now fully trust the competency of the person to whom they delegated the task. At this level, you might tell your employee, “Take care of it with your own approach, and I don’t need to know what you did.” This is the level that most people think about when they hear the word “delegate”; but the art of delegation is much more subtle.
I understand that it might seem downright scary to think of moving from Level 0 to Level 5 with your staff. That’s why it’s important to consider it as something you can work on together over time.
The beauty of this framework is that it allows leaders and staff to collaborate toward building a more autonomous and highly productive workforce.
I would even encourage you to print out this framework and share it with your team to explain where and how you want to go with them. Then, as you run into issues along the way, you can use those as coaching moments to explain how they have contributed to your decision to delegate further – or not.
While the goal should always be to reach Level 5 and make sure you as a leader haven’t become a bottleneck, it might be that some employees take longer to get there than others. Sometimes, you might even have to back an employee down a delegation level until you agree they are ready for more responsibility. Suppose you have a high-potential employee who is too eager to climb the corporate ladder, for example. In that case, you can use the five levels to help them understand how they can gain more autonomy over time by first earning their manager’s trust.
To find the perfect level of delegation, you will also need to consider the reversibility of the decisions and the risk of failure. We will cover that in a future article.
The beauty of this framework is that it allows leaders and employees to collaborate toward building a more autonomous and highly productive workforce.
