Storytime

Recently I was in a situation where I was pushing forward on a project when I should have been backing off. The problem was that as the technical leader, I framed my responsibility as "Do project XYZ." So when the going got tough I pushed harder, looking to achieve the outcomes established when I took ownership of this project. This framing resulted in my seeing success as completing the project, and all other outcomes as failure.

In reality, there was a greater context than "Do project XYZ" that I needed to consider. Framing my responsibility as "advance the team's and the client's interests regarding XYZ" would have given me the lenience to consider alternative outcomes as acceptable.

The Moral

The lesson here is for both people delegating leadership/responsibility and those accepting the responsibility. Both parties are equally responsible for getting the framing correct.

If you delegate leadership without framing the successful outcomes AND scenarios where corrective action should be taken you're simply doing poor micro-management. When you are still required to know when to course correct there is a risk of the delegate pursuing an outcome beyond the reasonable constraints. When leadership is being delegated to you, frame your responsibility in a way that includes the team's success metrics. Using this greater context, you can identify when to escalate or change courses.

I have seen this with delegating coding tasks to less experienced team members and not checking in with them frequently enough. They ended up down some rabbit hole, having spent more time and making less progress than was anticipated. It would have been better for them to pause, reframe the problem, ask for help, or come up with a different solution. And whether you check in with the team member or not, you are responsible for the outcome since you didn't ensure the bounds of the task were communicated. In this scenario, they were given a task without understanding how much effort the team should be spending on it.

Final thought: give as much freedom to your team members as possible. Check-in at regular intervals. When it's time to give the leadership of a chunk of your responsibility to a team member, make sure they understand the bounds of the responsibility they are given. This will lead to the most growth, efficiency and success.