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Comment by ulnarkressty | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer turned manager I often face blockers where I know that if I delegate it will take days or weeks to get it done properly, whereas if I just do it I will save myself and the team a lot of time.

However I'm still not sure if it's worth it in the end, perhaps it's one of these traps the article speaks of.

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The counterpoint is that if you as the leader just do the work yourself, then:

1. You're not being as effective a leader for your team while your attention is on your own individual contributor-level work, and

2. Your people aren't getting the learning experience of tackling the difficult jobs themselves, which means that the same thing is probably going to happen again the next time this kind of difficult blocker turns up.

In essence, you're getting a better result in the short term at the expense of better results in the long term.

And don't get me wrong -- sometimes that's the right choice!

I feel like one of the marks of a really strong working manager is the ability to recognise whether a situation is so critical to the company's survival that they (the manager) needs to handle it personally as a matter of simple survival, or whether they can get away with delegating it to team members who perhaps won't do as good or as quick a job as the manager themselves could, but who will learn and grow and improve as a result of being given the challenging task plus mentoring and feedback.

Most of the time, the most important, impactful thing a leader can do is to deepen their bench; increasing the skill of your team pays dividends for decades, even long after you've been further promoted or left the company.

But also if the leader does not continue to sharpen their technical skills they will become less effective over time. I wish I had the reference at hand but up-to-date technical skill is very important for leaders.

As with most things, I think the answer here is "it depends".

Is a similar blocker likely to reappear in the future? Is it one-off task that's unlikely to recur? Is it something that will have to be maintained by the team? Is it a task that would put you in the "hot path" of your team's project (e.g. could the team get blocked by you if you get sidetracked)? Is there a way for you to turn the task into a learning/growth opportunity for the team?

There are some tasks that are worth being picked up by the lead, the hard part is identifying which fall into that category! For myself, I like to pick up tasks only when they meet the following criteria:

1. The team can never be blocked on me (this is a "golden rule" for me, I never violate it)

2. The task is a "force multiplier" (completion of the task will enable the team to do more with less time/effort in the future)

3. The task requires experimentation

4. There are many potential ways to complete the task, but most are likely to be sub-optimal (and, due to 3., it's difficult or impossible to tell them apart!)

In my experience, these tasks have a hugely outsized impact on the overall efficacy of the team. Consider my primary role is to make the team run effectively, it's fitting that I should be willing to take on this type of work!

Maybe take the opportunity and grow (qualitatively) your team with those challenges. In the end you're just as good as your team. So it's in your best interest to teach them everything you can offer.

This goes both ways. If the team cannot grow or cannot match your skills, they will take you down with them.

maybe I misunderstand your point, but this doesn't sound like something a team player would say. Everyone can learn something and better. The better your team, the better your managing results will be. As easy as that.

If it's really that bad, then I wonder how someone ended up in such a place.

There are bad teams, departments, companies where people end up there for various reasons (great money, great new role, level and so on) and they might miss some context on why and how bad the situation is until they go there again for various reasons (they are hired as the new team lead so they haven’t selected the team members, they didn’t meet all the team when hiring, department has some weird team dynamics, team might be good but the rest of the department or company is incompetent, there is a problematic team member that made the previous lead leave, there is a problematic team lead with whom you need to collaborate and made the previous team lead leave and so on).

Any and more of these can make a person with good potential go down to their team/department level until they decide to just leave. So that’s what i am saying, it goes both ways for the team leader; great if the team/company is competent, not so great or even bad if the team/company is not.

that's a comprehensible explanation. Thanks for taking the time and hopefully things are going better in the future :)

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