05 · Delegation Deep Dive¶
Level 1 covered handing over a task. This module covers the two things that actually limit a leader's capacity: handing over a decision, and refusing to absorb conflict that belongs to someone else. Most managers who believe they delegate well are delegating execution and retaining judgement — the report does the work, you approve the outcome, and your calendar stays full while nobody grows past the approval step. The symptom is a manager who cannot take two consecutive weeks off. This module gives you a seven-level delegation scale, a written delegation contract, a rule for handling escalated conflict, and two worked examples.
1. Seven levels of delegation¶
"Delegate more" is useless advice because delegation is not binary. Naming the level converts a vague handover into a shared expectation.
| Level | Who decides | You say |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Tell | You decide, they execute | "Here's the decision and why." |
| 2 · Sell | You decide, and you sell it | "Here's the decision; let me explain the reasoning so you can carry it." |
| 3 · Consult | You decide, after their input | "I want your view before I decide. The call is mine." |
| 4 · Agree | You decide together | "Neither of us decides alone; we land it jointly." |
| 5 · Advise | They decide, with your input | "My view is X. It's your call, and I'll back whichever way you go." |
| 6 · Inquire | They decide, then tell you | "You decide. Tell me what you chose and why, afterwards." |
| 7 · Delegate | They decide; you don't need to know | "It's yours. I don't need to be in it at all." |
Three rules that make this usable:
- State the level out loud, at the start. The single most common delegation failure is a level mismatch: you thought level 6, they thought level 3, so they wait for you and you think they're passive.
- Level per decision, not per person. A report can be at 7 on supplier scheduling and 3 on anything touching a regulator, at the same time, and that is coherent rather than inconsistent.
- Move one level at a time, and say when. "You're at 5 on this now; after the next two, I want you at 6" turns delegation into a visible development path instead of an unpredictable weather system.
2. The delegation contract¶
For anything meaningful, five minutes writing this down prevents weeks of drift. Fill it in with the person, not for them.
DELEGATION CONTRACT
Decision or area: ______________________ Owner: ______________
Level (1-7): ____ Review date: __________
OUTCOME
What good looks like (in observable terms):
What is explicitly NOT in scope:
CONSTRAINTS (the real boundaries — be exhaustive, they can't guess)
Budget ceiling:
People who must be consulted:
Deadlines that are immovable:
Decisions that must come back to me, and why:
INFORMATION
What I know that they don't (context, history, politics):
Who has the rest of it:
AUTHORITY
What they can commit on my behalf:
How they should describe their mandate to others:
What I will say publicly to back that mandate:
CHECK-INS
Cadence: Format:
What I will do at a check-in: (review progress / answer questions)
What I will NOT do: (take the decision back)
FAILURE
What happens if it goes wrong — what I will do, in advance:
The last box matters more than the rest. If you have not decided in advance how you will behave when a delegated decision goes badly, you will behave the way you feel in the moment, which is to take it back — and the team will read the reversal, not the original delegation.
3. Delegating a decision, not just the work¶
The test of whether you delegated a decision is simple: could they make a choice you would not have made, and would it stand? If the answer is no, you delegated a recommendation.
Ana runs a 40-person operations function. She has told Priyanka to "own" the choice of a new shift-scheduling vendor. Two weeks later Priyanka arrives with a comparison and no decision.
Priyanka: Here are the three. Which do you want?
Ana: I said this was yours, and then I never said at what level, which is my mistake. Let me fix that now. This is level 5 — you decide, I'll give you my view if you want it, and I'll back whichever way you go, including if it's not the one I'd pick.
Priyanka: ...Okay. Do you want to give me the view?
Ana: Do you want it before or after you tell me yours?
Priyanka: After. Fine. I'd take Meridian. It's 15% more expensive and the interface is worse, but they'll do the data migration and the other two won't, and we don't have anyone to do a migration in Q3.
Ana: My instinct was the cheapest one, because I was looking at the annual cost and not at who does the migration. You've weighted a constraint I'd underweighted. Go with Meridian.
Priyanka: What if the migration slips and it looks bad?
Ana: Then it's a decision I backed. Here's what I'll actually do: if procurement or Finance push back, I'll tell them the choice was yours and that I support it — I won't distance myself. What I'd like in return is that you tell me early if it's going wrong, not late. Constraints I should have given you at the start: the ceiling is 90k a year, Legal has to see any contract over two years, and don't sign anything past March without me because of the budget cycle.
Priyanka: That's the first time I've had the actual number.
Note the two repairs. Ana names the level explicitly, and she states the constraints she had been holding in her head — the most common reason delegated decisions come back is that the person is guessing at boundaries nobody told them, and guessing conservatively means escalating.
4. Delegating upward conflict back down¶
The other capacity drain is being used as a channel between two people who could talk to each other. It feels like support and it is a habit you are training.
The rule: you carry the relationship, they carry the conversation. Absorb the conflict only when there is a genuine power asymmetry, when you have information they don't, or when it has already failed at their level twice.
Dan: Can you talk to Finance? They keep rejecting our purchase requests and Marta's impossible.
Ana: Tell me what's actually happening. What got rejected?
Dan: Three requests this month. The reason field just says "insufficient detail."
Ana: What did Marta say when you asked what detail she needs?
Dan: I haven't. She's rejected me three times, I'm not going to get a straight answer.
Ana: So the state of play is: three rejections, one hypothesis about her, and no conversation. If I go and ask her, what happens the fourth time it gets rejected?
Dan: ...I come back to you.
Ana: Right, and you've learned that the route to Finance is through me, which is worse for you than for me. Here's what I'll do and won't do. I won't have the conversation. I will tell you two things I know that you don't: Marta's team got audited in February and they're under instruction to document justification on everything, and she is not the one who wrote that rule. And I'll message her today saying you'll be in touch and that you have my backing on the spend. You ask her one question: "What would a request look like that you could approve first time?"
Dan: And if that goes nowhere?
Ana: Then come back and we look at it again — with what she said. If it's still stuck after you've tried properly, I'll go with you, not instead of you.
Ana gave Dan exactly what he lacked (context and air cover) and withheld exactly what he didn't (the conversation itself). She also set the condition for escalation in advance, so coming back isn't a defeat.
5. Failure modes¶
- Delegating the task, keeping the judgement. "Draft it and I'll review" every time is level 1 wearing a level 5 costume.
- Taking it back on the first wobble. If you reverse a delegated decision, say why in terms of the contract — "this crossed a constraint I gave you" — not in terms of quality, or nobody will use their authority again.
- Delegating without the information. People escalate because they are guessing at boundaries. Write the constraints down.
- Dumping. Handing over work you find dull with no growth in it and calling it development is transparent, and it is noticed.
How It Actually Works¶
The seven-levels model works because it decomposes "delegation" into a variable that most leaders treat as binary (delegated or not) but that is actually continuous: how much of the decision loop transfers. At the low levels, the leader retains the evaluate-and-decide step and the other person retains only the gather-information and execute steps. At the high levels, the other person owns the entire loop — gather, evaluate, decide, act, and even the decision of when (or whether) to report back. Most delegation failures trace to a level mismatch: the leader believes they delegated level 5 ("recommend, then act unless I say otherwise") while the report understood level 3 ("gather options for me to decide"), and the gap only surfaces when the report acts on a decision the leader thought was still theirs, or waits for approval the leader thought they'd already implicitly given. Naming an explicit level number closes this ambiguity the same way naming a delegation scope did in the Level 1 delegation module — through explicit shared specification, not inferred agreement.
Why the delegation contract has to specify the failure path, not just the task. Without an explicit understanding of what happens when something goes wrong (does the person escalate immediately, try to fix it and report after, or something in between), both parties default to their own risk tolerance — which are rarely the same, since the leader's risk tolerance was shaped by information (organizational context, other stakeholders' expectations) the report doesn't have. This is the delegation version of incomplete-contract problems in economics: any agreement that doesn't specify behavior in an off-path state (a failure) leaves that behavior to be filled in by each party's own guess, and guesses under stress tend to diverge more than guesses made calmly in advance.
Why "delegating upward conflict back down" is mechanically different from ordinary delegation. When a report brings a conflict or decision back up the chain, simply resolving it for them re-establishes the low-delegation default described in Level 1 (dependency, external locus of control) even if the original task was delegated at a high level — because the decision rights for this specific instance just moved back to the leader. Handing it back down ("what do you think the right call is here, and what would you need from me to make it?") preserves the decision rights at their originally delegated level and only transfers the narrower thing the report actually needed: information or authority they didn't have, not the decision itself.
Exercise¶
List every decision you personally made in the last two weeks. For each, write the level from section 1 that you actually operated at, and the level it could be at with the right constraints written down. Pick the one with the biggest gap and fill in the delegation contract in section 2 with that person this week — including the failure box.
Separately, count the times in the last month you were the messenger between two people who could have spoken directly. For the next one, use Ana's structure in section 4: give the context and the air cover, decline the conversation, and name in advance what would make escalation legitimate.