Being in the Details
The distinction between delegation and abdication: effective managers must know what's happening in their organization and actively steer output, or they're not doing their job.
tl;dr
Career progress and creating safe spaces for your team cannot come at the cost of not knowing what's happening in your organization. When delegation goes wrong, it becomes abdication. Effective managers must be able to answer key questions about their team's work, estimates, architecture, incidents, and KPIs.
My Thoughts
However, if all of that (career progress, safe space…) is coming at the cost of not knowing what’s going on in your organization and not actively steering the output, you’re not doing your job. Period.
When we get delegation wrong is called abdication, basically you need to know what is going on and answer questions like:
- What is person X working on right now? What did they get done last week?
- Why is project Y estimated to take this long?
- What is the proposed architecture and trade-offs for project Z? Why were other options not considered?
- How many incidents did you have last month?
- How are you performing to your KPIs and SLOs this quarter?
This is my personal commentary on the original article. Please read the original article for the full context.