192 How Do I Delegate Work Safely and Effectively?

How do I delegate work to my team members? How do I give work to junior members who are going to struggle with it when I know a senior developer can do it well? How do I give up work when others don't do it as well as I would? These are the questions we will answer in today's episode of Dev Questions. 

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

How do I delegate work safely and effectively? If I have a team, how do I pass information out? Because I know some team members won't do it as well as others, but I need to give them some work, right? Let's talk about that in today's episode of Dev Questions. Now, this comes from the suggestion site, and if you have a suggestion, go to suggestions.imtimcorey.com and leave it there. So let's start out by setting some basic expectations of what's going to happen with delegation because it's important to understand some things going into talking about delegation. Now, number one, no one is going to perform a task exactly like you expect them to. At least not at first. So the reason for this is because no one can read your mind. I have done delegation a lot. I have done it well, I have done it poorly. And one of the things that I have found is that it really doesn't matter how experienced a person is, how skilled the person is, how effective they will be at their position, if I don't really work hard to communicate and then also work hard at following up after tasks are done, that it's really hard to get them up to speed because they can't read my mind. They don't know exactly what I'm expecting. So when I say, hey, do this, my brain fills in all the rest of the stuff. Like, you know, I might say, hey, can you move my car out front? Here's a simple example. No, I don't have people move my cars. But if I say, hey, move my car out front, please. Well, I might expect that they would move it out to the last spot on the parking pad. They would back in, that they would make sure to lock the doors, that they would make sure to clean out any junk they found in the vehicle. Where they might pull it in the first spot and pull it in instead of backing it in. And they might not lock the doors or take any junk out. Well, I can't expect them to have read my mind and know all of that. Now, delegation means that people aren't going to do tasks exactly like you expect them to. Next time, I didn't tell you this, but next time, can you back it in and put it in the last spot? I prefer it in the last spot because it's closer to that other door or something like that. And, you know, hey, when you do that, can you also make sure you lock the doors? I just like, I just prefer to have my doors locked. And when you're going in, I always like to grab any kind of junk that's in the vehicle and take it in, you know, and throw it away. So, hey, when you're just walking in anyway, can you just grab, you know, grab a handful? You don't have to grab everything. I have a clean vehicle, but grab any, you know, just grab a handful and then bring it in and throw it away. So by doing that, they know next time when you say, hey, can I move my vehicle up front? They know more of what you expect. And they do it more like you would like. And they're still gonna mess up. But they're getting closer. And you can, you know, remind them and say, hey, don't forget to back in next time, not pull in, or whatever it may be. But that allows you over time to bring them up to speed of how you would do things. Number two, delegation can actually drop productivity, at least at first. This is something that people don't often expect, is that they think, well, I'll add more people to the team and we'll get more productive. Yeah, eventually, but not at first. New people are less efficient and less skilled than you are or the person they're replacing or adding to. So delegating is going to drop productivity at first. So you have to plan for that. And we'll talk about that in a minute. Number three, mistakes are going to happen more frequently. One of the things I have found, I started work as a in this job, as a solo entrepreneur. It was just me. And so every task got done the way I expected it to. Um, and it was done to my level of specification. And for the most part, it didn't have very many mistakes in it because I knew exactly what to expect, exactly how to do it, and I had been experienced in doing these things. Well, when I add people, I have to explain more. I have to, you know, teach people, bring people up and teach them things that I've known for years, but I have to kind of bring those years of experience and compress it in some way to give to them. So mistakes are gonna happen, and they're gonna happen more frequently than if just you did it or just your senior people did it. So it's gonna happen, and you just have to be ready for it. That's part of the dip in productivity. Number four, delegation is gonna cost you time and money that will not be regained right away. This comes back to the loss of productivity for one. But it's also the idea that you know what, when you are delegating, you're going to be spending more time training them, you're gonna give them more resources, you're gonna have to figure out where do you put their desk even. So trying to rearrange that, all these things are going to take away from your productivity. Delegation is gonna cost you time and money that's not gonna be regained right away. It's not like you hire someone new and day one, they start producing value for you in excess of what they cost. If they do, I love to find that industry because I could hire millions of people. If if day one they they make more money than they cost, that'd be awesome. Just doesn't happen. Number five, you have to understand why you are delegating. It's really important that you understand why you're delegating. What goal are you trying to achieve? And we're gonna talk about this more because companies and people who don't understand the why of what they're delegating, they don't understand their goal they're trying to achieve. Well, what happens is they have lots of employees that aren't really being effective. And they get frustrated because work isn't being done. And the goals they have that they didn't really put their finger on aren't being accomplished with any more regularity. And so they lay people off and they say, oh, we're too bloated, and just start cutting people. But they don't understand why they were delegating in the first place or what their goal was. And because they didn't have a clear goal, they couldn't measure to see if they were achieving that. So now we have kind of the doom and gloom out of the way, because it does sound like delegation is horrible, and in some ways it can be. But now we have that out of the way, let's talk about how to delegate effectively because you need to. In order to grow, you're going to need to delegate at some point. I can't cross this with my business because I was one person doing everything. Guess what? I'm not one person doing everything anymore. I have four employees. That's because I've been having, I needed to delegate more work so I can get more accomplished. But let's talk about how to delegate effectively, and then we'll talk through what I've done, how I've done it, and my strategies for doing it well. So, the ways to delegate effectively. Number one, understand your core role in the organization or in your in your life, and then delegate everything else that you can. So, understand what it is that you're good at? What is your purpose for being in this department, in this role, or being at this company? So, for me, when I was just me, I had to know what was it about me that was core. What was the most important thing? What was the reason why I did the job that I did? What was the one thing that I could do better than anybody else? And that was the one thing. And we'll talk more about that in a minute. Number two, delegate to the lowest level possible. So when you're delegating, don't just find the rock star in the department. So let's just say you are the software development manager, and your goal, your purpose is to improve how fast code gets out and to improve code quality. And your goal is to lead the team. So that's that's your core thing is to lead the team. So you're gonna delegate and you're gonna find people to give work to. Well, when you have coding projects to give, don't always just give it to your senior developer. Delegate to the lowest developer possible. Bring them up. Get them more experience. We're gonna have an example of why this is so important in just a minute. Number three, delegate before you are ready. What I mean by this is when you're overloaded, it's too late. Remember, delegation is gonna take cost you time, it's gonna cost you energy, it's gonna cost you money. It's gonna be slow, it's gonna reduce your overall effectiveness at first. So that the time to do that is not when you're overloaded. So if you need, you know, if you're gonna get crunched at, let's say, Christmas time, and you know you have to write lots of software at Christmas time for whatever reason, and so you say, hey, you know what? On December 15th, I'm gonna start hiring developers. It's too late. It good luck, but it's just not gonna work well. Maybe you get it to work, but really what you're gonna do is just put a lot of time and effort and be a lot really frustrated. Start hiring October or at the latest November, but you know, that's that's pushing it. What you want to do is get people in, get people up to speed, and and get through that valley of not as effective and get back at least to where you were before you start climbing out and being more effective than you were. Number four, prepare for that loss of proactivity. So again, coming back to number three, you know, delegate before you're ready. Make sure that when you number four are preparing for your loss of productivity, you're thinking through, okay, you know, summer is a pretty slow time for us. That's a great time to start delegating. That's a great time to start giving away roles and saying, hey, can I bring you up to speed in this? Hey, you're an intern. Can I give you more responsibility and bring you up to a junior developer? Hey, can I grow your experience? It's a great time to do that because you'll lose productivity in a time when you're already, you know, kind of chill and kind of relaxed and don't have that major stress on you. So prepare for that loss by choosing when to take on more deleg or give more delegation away. The analogy I use is to treat your team like a sports team. Now, I'm a big sports nut, I love a lot of different sports, but one of the sports that I like is basketball. So a lot of the world knows basketball. At any given time, you have five players on the court. And the temptation is to put your best five players on the floor and play them the entire game. Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you give less than your best, right? The problem is that while this works at first, over time, over the season, those players get worn out or they get hurt. And their replacements have been sitting on the bench. They're not as good as the starting five. And so they don't have the experience. They haven't worked with the rest of your team. And so it's, you know, it's a bad result. As a result, your team suffers and your team typically loses. Even worse, things will come to a head right around the playoffs. So I've seen teams that are very, very good, but they only have five or maybe six good players. And so they play those five or six players the whole season and they do really well. And they, you know, they're conquering teams that you know are really good. And so they're really moving really well. But then come playoff time, you know, their starting point guard is his ankles hurt. And the other guy's got a calf strain, and another guy gets tired and is slower than he used to be and isn't hit as jump shots as often. And so what happens is your team is kind of just busted up right when you need your team to be fully there and to be their best. So the key to being a good coach and the key to managing your team well is to let your lesser players play during the regular season. Don't just have your starting five, have your team sub in often. Have the other players who aren't as good get better, give them more experience. And you know what? Instead of blowing teams out, you might win by a couple of points. You might even lose some games. But it's important to build up your bench because what happens is when it comes time down a stretch and your starting point guard goes out with a broken ankle, you have someone to step in that's almost as good or that's much better than they would be otherwise. And your team has a much better chance. This is the same thing for business. So you could give all of your development work to your best developer. It would most likely be done quickly and the way you want. The problem is you're gonna overload your best developer, you're gonna burn them out. So then when they go on a vacation or get sick, work grinds to a halt. And then you're trying to call them and say, hey, I know you're in the in bed or the flu and you feel horrible, but can you jump on work and fix this problem we have because no one else knows what to do? That's not great. That's not what you want from your team. Because that's not a team effort, then. It's one star trying to pull everybody else along. And that only works as long as they're perfectly healthy, perfectly happy, and can just churn out work forever with no problems. This doesn't happen. So instead, you should give your best developer the most important work, mostly, but give the rest of the developers the other work. Bring them up. Start to give them some of the important work too. And help them move along. Have your senior developer help the junior developers. It's gonna be slower, it's gonna take productivity away. Your senior developers are gonna say, I could just do this. Don't let them. Have them bring the junior developers along. Have them bring the mid-level developers along. Elevate your entire team. This will give them the experience they need and allow them to grow. It will also allow you to have a fallback plan when your best developer is unavailable or quits. Because now the department doesn't fall apart. Instead, you just keep going on. And unlike a sports team, you don't have to limit how many people are participating at any one time. It's not you can say, well, I can only have five developers working at a time. Put them all in. Give them all a role, allow them to build up, allow them to have the experience, allow them to make mistakes, spend more time pair programming, spend more time with code reviews, bring the entire team up. Now, for me, this works a bit differently because I'm not currently leading a team that only does one similar thing. I'm not leading a team of developers right now. I'm eventually going to, but instead, I'm leading a company where everyone has a unique task. However, each person I've hired has replaced part of what I do. So how does it work for me? Well, I identified what my core role is. I create training content. That's what I do. That's the core of what I do and what I'm not hiring somebody else to do. I'm not delegating that part. Instead, that's me. That's the thing that I do. So I then identified what are some secondary tasks that slow me down? Which ones slay down the most? And then one by one, I've hired people to do those tasks. So I hired an accounting firm to handle my accounting. I can't tell you how many times I have been frustrated at a tax form. I'm just not in the mood to learn taxes. I just don't want to. It's not my core wheelhouse. It's not even the core of what my company does. My company does training. So you know what? We're not going to do other things to distract us from that. And one of those is trying to learn the tax code. I've hired somebody to do that. And you know what? That started off with, I think I paid less than $300 my first year for an accounting firm to do my accounting. That's not a lot of money compared to what work they were doing and what they took off my plate. If you start doing the math on even one day worth of my time, what does that equate to an hourly basis? Not that much money. So we're talking $25 an hour, and all of a sudden I'm breaking even. Like if I was only paying myself $25 an hour, that's $200. I'm paying less than $300, you know, so $30 an hour. So is my time worth $30 an hour or more? Yeah, especially with a frustration to add on top of that and the fact that I could get things wrong really easy. Whereas they're much better at that. So you don't have to delegate just to full-time employees. You can delegate to contractors or delegate to firms or other services. I've delegated to Fiverr before. Now, the next thing I did, excluding some of my Fiverr and Upwork and all these other smaller things, the next thing I did is I hired a full-time employee, Dan, to do my design work. I am horrible at design. But even worse, I don't have a great eye for design. But even worse, what happens is I will have an idea for what I want, and then I'll try and find a way to do that on my own. And there's tools out there to help. I love Canva. Canva enables me to do things that I probably shouldn't be doing because it allows me to make it look better than maybe it really should. But when I do that, I start looking at go, okay, I've got kind of pieces I want, but I'm staring at going, it's not quite right. And I'll stare at it, I'll stare at it, and I'll stare at it, and I'll spend time and time and time looking at this design, trying to figure out how to make this better. And what it does is it locks me up. And so I'm spending lots of time on design work that at the end of the day isn't that great anyway. So I hired Dan and said, hey, you know what? Take all this time off my plate and take all this stress off my plate and give me better designs. So that was his role, and he's expanded out of that. We'll talk about that in a minute. I hired Tom to work with the community. That includes creating and then managing our help desk. There's hundreds, thousands of emails that come in that he has to process and handle and figure out okay, this person didn't get the course when they bought it. This account needs to be shut off. This, you know, all these things that happen that are just day-a-day working with a business. And he handles all of that. He also handles working with talking to the community and getting feedback from the community and figuring out, you know, what things are broken, what things can be done better, how can we optimize what we do to better help the community? And so I was doing all that. And now Tom takes a big chunk of that off my plate. And then I hired Noah to do my web development. And while I'm very good at web development, it isn't a part of my core value to the company. I can do it very well. I can do it better than Noah can. But here's the deal. I hired Noah to take that off my plate because it was time spent doing something that wasn't part of my core value to the company or my core value to you. So I've built him up, I have trained him, I've helped him grow in that role. And he He has done things slower than me. He's made more mistakes than I would have. And he has done things that aren't as good as I would have done. That's okay. He knows that. I know that. That's okay because that's part of the process of delegation. Is there is that downtime, there is that trough where things aren't as good. And you know what? They're a lot better now. These are a lot faster now than I would be. Because there have been, we've got lots of websites and he handles them. And so they're just done. And I don't have to think about it. I come in the morning, all of a sudden I've got all these pull requests review because he's done a lot of work. And I'm like, cool. I didn't have to think about that or do that. He's taking care of it. And so now, because I spent that time, because we went through that trough of being less productive, now he is more productive than I would be. And overall, as a company, we are more productive. And for me personally, I have less to do that isn't part of my core value to the company. Next up, I hired Amy to be my executive assistant. She handles all of our administrative tasks. So if she can find an administrative task to take off my plate, she does it does it. It's awesome. She does scheduling, she does travel, she does other tasks, she has takes over, she has my task list that she manages. So she is taking away a lot of the management, the stuff that I don't have to do. And because of that, I can focus more on core value. But it takes time to get it up to speed. So there's again that curve. It's called a J curve typically, where what happens is you lose that productivity. But at some point, you bring it back to the same productivity level as before, even though you have two people now instead of one. And then it goes beyond. And that's the important part, is how high beyond it goes. And I can tell you, now that I have four employees, that I am so much more productive than I was in 2019 when I was a solo entrepreneur. I get so much more done. I provide so much more content to the community. It's a much higher level. And we have much larger things we can do kind of behind the scenes and bring out and roll out because of my team. And beyond that, I have done things like take a two-week vacation and things still got done. Where I'm not doing anything, and all of a sudden things happen. And when things break, I was at the beach and things broke and I said, Hey, Tom, fix that. And it's taken care of. And so I can pass things off and not have to worry about being on all the time, even though I'm a business owner, and even though I'm ultimately responsible for this whole business. Now, beyond what I hired my teammates for, I worked to empower them to grow and take on more responsibility. What that did is it gives me more time to create more content, but it also allows them to grow in their skills and their roles and kind of fill in gaps that otherwise weren't being filled or were being done by me. And so Tom is doing much more than I hired him for. Dan's doing much more than I hired him for. Noah's doing more than I hired him for, and Amy is doing more than I hired her for. Because they're finding new things and saying, hey, you know what? I can cross-train the help desk. Hey, I can do this search engine optimization, or I can do this marketing, or I can, you know, hire this contractor and run this contractor. All these things are being done because they're able to have more power and be able to kind of grow beyond their initial scope. And that makes us more effective. Now, the scary thing is that they don't always get it right. It's going to happen. But you know what? That's part of delegation. You have to acknowledge with delegation that things aren't going to go perfectly. They're not going to go exactly how you expect them to, and that's okay. Because it should be that the benefits outweigh the costs. You know what? If you get a couple things wrong and 50 things right, that's pretty good. You know, if you save me 20 hours a week, but cost me half an hour, no big deal. So that's the result of being able to delegate and give more power away. So be careful to look for delegation from only one side. So I've given a lot of stuff away to my team, and that has empowered me to do a whole lot more. I also have a lot more meetings, I have a lot more administrative tasks and more expenses because of my team. So the trade-offs, they're worth it, but only if you keep focused on your goal. So that's why I say it's really important that you understand your goal. Otherwise, you're going to end up with a team that's busy, but not actually moving you towards your goal any faster. So with me, it's not just, hey, can I give work to you? And that's it. It's, hey, can I give work to you so that I can replace that with more content creation, so that we can help more people in the community, so that we can grow the services we offer at imtimcore.com. There's a lot of reasons why we delegate, but it's never just to end up just doing more stuff. And we evaluate what are we doing? Sometimes we say, hey, you know what, you're doing that? I don't want you to anymore, because that's not helping us achieve our goal, or we're not caught that thing entirely. So it's important that you understand what your goal is and keep an eye on that so you're moving towards that goal faster, not just bogging yourself down with delegated work. Because delegation does have a cost. And as long as you're getting more back from it than it costs, that's great. And as long as you're moving towards your goal, not just randomly. That's important too. Okay? So that's my thoughts on delegation, how to do it, and how to do it effectively, both in a software team or as well as a regular general team, or on your own in your day-to-day life if you've got a side job or working on your own as an entrepreneur. All right, thanks for listening. As always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Def Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to Iamtimcorey.com and enroll in a course.