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Comment by TripleChecker | Hacker News Reader

Delegation was one I struggled with a lot in the early days. Even as the CEO, I was reluctant to give up my customer service responsibilities of manning the inboxes. Eventually, I understand that even if someone handled it only 80-90% as well, that would be much better for the company than having me do it.

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Delegation is so hard, i struggle constantly and I'm technically a "Sr. Manager". When the project is up against deadline pressure, it's so tempting to do something yourself that only takes you a day vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway. Inevitably you become the bottleneck when a wave of escalations or other management tasks come down the pipe but there's a pile of actual work you decided to take on yourself half done too.

I moved up to Director this year, and explicitly called out that if I needed to give up any more direct interaction with ICs and "contact time" with the real builders I had probably topped out. I've mitigated this a lot with an awesome team of leads and managers, and a (hopefully good kind of) lazy, non-prescriptive management style.

> vs delegating to someone else and they spin on it for 3 and screw it up at the end anyway.

If that is happening more than twice in a 6 month period you need to do a post-mortem on your management style, something is wrong. Spinning on a task is already a bad sign pointing at a problem that can be solved at the management level.

Sounds like there are some fundamental process/team issues going on. If a team cannot be trusted to deliver, superman always coming in to save the day shouldn't be the solution.

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