Your day to day
Delegating without losing control
Sharing out the work and still knowing how it is going, without asking every day.
Delegation nearly always fails the same way: whoever delegates loses visibility and recovers it by asking, and whoever received the work reads those questions as distrust. It is not a people problem: the state of the work is not anywhere both can look.
What to make clear when delegating
- 1
What "finished" means
Not "handle this supplier's onboarding", but what must be done to call it closed.
- 2
Which decisions they can take and which not
It prevents both paralysis and unpleasant surprises.
- 3
By when
With a date. "Whenever you can" competes with everything else and loses.
- 4
And where progress will be visible
The point almost nobody agrees, and the one that makes daily questions unnecessary.
Important
The fourth point replaces supervision. If the state is visible in the file, the delegator looks whenever they want without interrupting, and the doer does not have to report. Both gain the same thing: they stop talking about status and start talking about problems.
What to look at, and how often
| What | How often | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Whatever has been stuck longest | Weekly | That is where the problem is, not in what is moving |
| Whatever is due soon | Weekly | It is the only genuinely urgent thing |
| Everything else | Not needed | Looking at it is micromanagement by another name |
Watch out
If you find yourself reviewing every delegated file, you have not delegated: you have shared out execution and kept the duty to watch, which is the part that eats time.
When something gets stuck
Reassigning a stuck file without talking usually solves that case and spoils the next: the person it was taken from will stop flagging when something gets difficult.
Worth knowing
If a file has no named owner it is not delegated: it is in the air. "The team" answers for nothing, and that is always discovered late.
›What if I delegate to someone new?
More detail on what "finished" means, same review frequency.
›Should several people share a file?
One answers and others help; two owners is none.
›How do I know if I am micromanaging?
If you are asking about things you could look at yourself, you are.
A real case
The situation
A manager delegates fifteen files and ends up asking about them every morning.
What you do
- Agrees what "finished" means and where progress is visible
- Reviews only what is stuck and what is due
What you get
Stops asking, and the team starts flagging obstacles on its own.
The situation
Supplier onboarding is delegated and every file is still reviewed one by one.
What you do
- Assigns files to whoever handles them
- Checks the overall status instead of case by case
- Keeps review for what falls outside the pattern
What you get
Control is kept without repeating the work of whoever does it.
The situation
It is delegated and nobody knows what criteria to apply.
What you do
- Writes the criteria into the template
What you get
Decisions are the same whoever takes them.
The situation
It is delegated and what gets stuck drops out of sight.
What you do
- Reviews what is stalled once a week
What you get
The blockage is visible without looking at everything.
The situation
Whoever receives the delegation cannot close files.
What you do
- Adjusts permissions to the delegated work
What you get
The delegation genuinely works.
The situation
It is delegated and then corrected behind their back.
What you do
- Discusses the correction with whoever handles it
What you get
The criteria get learned rather than the error repeated.
This article answers
- delegating without losing visibility
- how to know if delegated work is progressing
- sharing files across a team
- following up without micromanaging