In a previous life, I delegated a lot more than I do now. I had to. I was responsible for more than 2,300 employees who depended, in one way or another, on the decisions I made, and there was no realistic way I could personally handle everything that came with that.
On a normal day, I could have 400 emails land in my inbox, meetings stacked back to back, travel, site visits, budgeting, business development, personnel issues, client problems, and everything else that came with running a $75 million operation across 30,000 square miles.
I could start the morning explaining my expectations to a group of new hires and, before lunch, be across the table from a CEO explaining why their $20 million facility needed to pay more. If I tried to keep every decision and every piece of work on my own desk, nothing would’ve gotten done.
So I delegated. A lot.
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The scale is different now, but the principle isn’t. I can hand somebody the work and give them room to make decisions without pretending my responsibility disappeared with the assignment.
If every meaningful decision has to come back through me, I haven’t built much of a team. I’ve built a group of people who know how to wait for the chief.
So when I hand something off, I start with the person and the assignment. An officer handling something they’ve done a hundred times doesn’t need the same supervision as somebody taking on a complicated assignment for the first time. The amount of freedom I give them depends on what the work involves and what I already know about how they handle responsibility.
They also need to know where their authority starts and stops. If I give an officer a project, I don’t want them coming back for permission on every minor choice because I failed to explain what they could decide themselves.
That only works if I’ve explained what I expect well enough for them to know what success looks like. They need the authority, information, equipment, access, and support to do what I gave them.
I can’t make somebody responsible for a result while keeping so much control that they never had a real chance to own the work. There are limits. Some decisions belong at my level. Some involve money, policy, or approval that the person handling the assignment doesn’t have. That doesn’t make the delegation meaningless. It just means I need to be clear about which decisions are theirs and which still come back to me.
How closely I follow the work depends on the assignment too. Giving somebody room to work isn’t the same thing as disappearing. An experienced officer may need almost none. Somebody learning something new may need more direction and more frequent check-ins.
If I’m using an assignment to help somebody develop judgment, I have to give them enough room to make decisions without pretending they’re already ready for everything. Sometimes I’ll get that balance wrong. I may check too much, not enough, or give somebody more than they were ready to handle. Then I adjust.
What I don’t want to do is turn delegation into an excuse when something goes badly. My first question shouldn’t be, “Who did I give that to?” I want to know what happened, including what the employee did and what I did before the problem showed up.
Did I choose the right person? Was the expectation clear? Did they understand their authority? Did they have what they needed? Did I check the work when I should have? Did I see trouble coming and ignore it? Those are the questions that keep accountability from stopping at the lowest level of the organization.
Sometimes the answer is that the employee had clear expectations, enough authority, the right resources, reasonable supervision, and still failed to do the job.
If that’s what happened, they own that.
Delegation doesn’t make me responsible for every decision somebody else makes. It makes me responsible for the parts that were mine before, during, and after I handed them the work.
