Good Controls Make Delegation Possible
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”— W. Edwards Deming
“The project manager should own the system that connects all of it.”— Scott Kinder
Haven’t we all seen this? A manager asks for ownership and initiative. Someone makes a routine decision and the manager asks who authorized it.
The team adjusts. Decisions wait for approval. Management then schedules a meeting to discuss the team’s lack of initiative.
Scott Kinder explores a related problem in The Project Manager Shouldn’t Be the Hardest-Working Person on the Project: the dependency created when a PM repeatedly takes on everyone else’s responsibilities. I agree with his argument that the PM should build a dependable system for delivery and that requires doing the management work that makes delegation possible.
My approach is to establish the systems and controls, then delegate within them. Agree on the result, provide the authority and resources, and define when escalation is necessary. I need visibility into progress and risk. The team needs to get things done without booking an appointment with me.
If “controls” makes you uneasy, call it visibility. We need to know whether the work is producing the intended result and where action is needed. Useful controls help people make decisions. Requiring approval for every routine choice teaches them to stop making decisions. We should hardly be astonished when the training works.
Agile and Lean depend on empirical thinking: observe what happens, examine the evidence, and adjust. Scrum makes this explicit through transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Lean’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle tests whether a proposed improvement actually improves anything. Neither approach gives the most senior person an exemption from being wrong.
Visibility serves the team, too. People need enough information to recognize problems and enough authority to respond. Calling a lack of visibility “empowerment” does not make the eventual surprises any less expensive.
Before delegating, establish what successful completion means, who will accept it, and whether the person has the capacity to deliver. Resolve competing priorities with functional managers and the sponsor. A responsibility matrix can document those agreements; it cannot negotiate them.
The manager still has work to do: verify progress, resolve conflicts beyond the owner’s authority, and address missed commitments. Every review should support a decision or useful action. “Senior management likes to see it” invites a reasonable question about what senior management does after seeing it.
An overloaded PM, however, is not automatically a micromanager. Someone compensating for absent sponsorship or inadequate staffing needs a different remedy. Delegation cannot manufacture capacity. Calling a staffing shortage an accountability problem merely gives management somebody else to lecture.
Good controls let people act while keeping the manager sufficiently informed to remain accountable. That also means allowing a capable person to choose an approach you would not have chosen. Your personal preference does not become a quality standard because you are in charge.
Before your next review, ask a team member which decisions they can make without your approval. Compare their answer with yours. Clarify the authority, agree on the visibility you both need, and let them use it.
Where have your controls made delegation easier, and where have they made you the person everyone waits for?
Comments