Soft Skills: Effective Delegation

A key scale out skill is delegation. Effective delegation refers to a small negative impact to the delegator resulting in a large positive impact via the effort of the delegatee.   Maximum delegation efficiency occurs in stewardship delegation. Stewardship delegation empowers the delegatee to be responsible for the delegated task, and takes an initially large investment from the delegator. However, once the stewardship delegation relationship has been established, minimal effort is required by the delegator to maintain the impact of the delegatee.



A delegation relationship can be modelled as a teeter totter with the delegator on the left and the delegatee on the right.   The effectiveness of the delegation can be thought of as the pivot location. To increase the effectiveness of the delegation, the pivot must be moved to the left which allows small effort by the delegator to enable large impact via the delegatee.



The pivot location and its movement is a function of delegation style.   At the extreme of delegation styles is gopher delegation and stewardship delegation. Gopher delegation keeps the responsibility for the task with the delegator and involves telling the delegatee extremely prescriptive tasks e.g.  go for this, go for that.   Stewardship delegation transfers the responsibility for the delegated task  to the delegatee and requires the delegator explaining the end result and the operating principles of the delegated task to the delegatee.



At the start of gopher delegation  the teeter totter pivot starts at the left of center with the delegator's cost less than the gains achieved through the work of the delegatee.  This makes the delegator effective from the start, and seems great.   However, over time as the delegatee does tasks wrong,  as the delegated tasks start having complications, and ultimately as the delegatee gets bored and disengaged, the pivot begins to move the to the right.   After a while, gopher delegation results in a pivot right of center, and the delegation ends up being ineffective.  Eventually, more time is required from the delegator then is gained from the actions of the delegatee and thus gopher delegation is best used for short lived scoped tasks.



At the start of stewardship delegation, the teeter totter pivot starts very far to the right. Significant time needs to be spent to engage the delegatee. The delegatee needs to understand the desired result, the operating parameters, and ultimately needs to be feel empowered and responsible.   Over time, as the delegatee understands her role and its responsibilities the pivot begins to move to the left, but the delegator still requires large investment as she must provide feedback and encouragement.  Eventually the pivot will cross the center, and continue moving left until the delegator is only required to give the briefest task, and know with confidence the delegatee can complete the delegated tasks.



Large scale effective delegation requires stewardship delegation.  Because stewardship delegation requires passing the responsibility for the delegated task from the delegator to the delegatee it requires a large upfront investment. However over time, as the delegatee is empowered, minimal delegator effort will result in large impact from the delegatee.



A future posts will discuss how to establish stewardship delegation.

Soft Skills: Scaling out vs scaling up

Scaling up refers to becoming a more effective person by increasing your personal efficiency. Scaling out refers to being a more effective person by engaging others to help solve your problems.    While scaling out is initially more difficult than scaling up, it has the potential for significantly more effectiveness than scaling up, so you should spend time investing in both types of scaling.

To understand the entomology of these terms lets look at the computer domain.  In the domain of computers there are two common ways to achieve more computing power or scale. Scaling up and scaling out.

Scaling up refers to getting more computing hardware for a single machine.  For example,  getting more RAM, faster CPUs or even bigger disks for the same computer.     On the other hand, scaling out refers to getting more computers. Instead of making your single computer faster you break up the problem so it can be processed by multiple computers and use the multiple computers to get the job done.



Scaling out requires changing the way the problem is solved, forcing co-ordination and making the problem more complex. As a result scaling up sounds like the way to scale.



At first, scaling up is  the easy way to scale. You throw some new hardware in the computer, and without much work you have more computing power.   As you upgrade your computer you start getting diminishing returns. Consecutive upgrades get more and more expensive, until eventually you can no longer upgrade your computer as it will be at its maximum power.  At this point you have no choice but to scale out.



Scaling out is hard. It requires you to think about how the problem can be broken up, how the computers can be coordinated and  how to keep the computers synchronized.  However, once you've made your problem solvable through scale-out solutions you can often add lots of computers. By scaling out, you can have significantly more computing power then you could ever have via a scale up solution.



As with computers and computing power, people often require more effectiveness to solve their problems. They have two ways to solve their problems, either they scale up, by becoming more efficient, or they scale out by engaging others to help solve their problems.



Humans scaling up reach diminishing returns - an easy to understand limit is the hours in a day.  Regardless of how efficient you are, you still only get 24 hours in a day.



As an alternative to scaling up, humans can scale out.  Scaling out requires figuring out how to break up problems so more than one person can work on them, and figuring out how the people will co-ordinate.



While scaling out is initially more difficult than scaling up, it has the potential for significantly more effectiveness than scaling up, so you should spend time investing in both types of scaling.



If you've read the 7 habits of highly effective people, you may notice that scaling up refers to the 3 habits of independence, while scaling out refers to 3 habits of interdependence.  I'll spend many more posts discussing these two types of scaling.