Empower or Delegate?
Cracking the Code to Leadership Duality
If you are new to Leadership Letters, this is a periodic publication where I share insights into leadership qualities and challenges that are commonly encountered but not frequently discussed. Drawing from my experiences in the industry, working with leaders at prominent companies such as Apple, Google (#faang), and beyond, I aim to explore effective engineering leadership styles. My goal is to infuse a sense of enjoyment into technology, as it rightfully should be for all.
Today we are going to walk the fine line between “Delegation” and “Empowerment”. I will elucidate how the performance of your team can fluctuate as you traverse this spectrum from one end to the other.
The words Delegate and Empower are often used interchangeably, as they mean almost the same thing. However the secret lies in the subtle difference. Roughly these two words mean ‘assigning or giving someone authority to do something’, but we will dig deeper to understand the difference.
Delegate
Delegating involves entrusting a specific task or responsibility to someone else. When you delegate, you are assigning a particular job to another person while retaining overall accountability. Delegation is about distributing the workload efficiently and ensuring that tasks are performed by the most suitable individuals within a team or organization.
Empower
Empower on the other hand involves giving someone the authority and autonomy. It’s more about transferring the accountability to a certain extent, letting someone else take ownership of the situation/problem.
So far we understand that empowering someone involves taking more hands off approach than delegating tasks. That means empowering is better than delegating. Is it that simple though? Let’s talk about a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the difference.
Imagine you’re managing a team of 6 ICs (mix of various seniority) and your senior leadership shares the organizational direction/priorities for the next 3 years. Your team owns a lot of the areas that the company needs to deliver on. How can you empower others on your team with the same vision? You might feel motivated for making these changes but do you delegate or empower?
One choice is to divide the goal into smaller pieces yourself and then assign (“delegate”) individual pieces, this is one end of the spectrum. Sometimes this is known as “micro-managing”, definitely does not sound fun. The other end of the spectrum would be to share the vision and identify appropriate owners. Taking the more hands-off approach, sounds ideal right?
In reality neither of them work. The missing piece of the puzzle is how do you instill the sense of ownership when you are taking the hands-off approach. The answer is you can not, certainly not by simply “empowering”. In some previous posts we talk about how everyone sees the same world in their own unique way. Things that motivate you most likely aren't as appealing to others. This is where I found the true meaning of Empowerment. It comes from within, you cannot empower another person, in reality it’s just a fancy way of saying delegation.
What should I do instead?
Continuing on the scenario above, here is a more systematic approach to tackle it.
Understanding Your Team: To initiate the process, take the time to understand each member of your team. This understanding will provide valuable insights for crafting a more personalized incentive structure.
Emphasizing Transparency: Another crucial factor is transparency. Share the overarching direction with your entire team, avoiding the temptation to share it exclusively with the Staff engineer first (even though it may cross your mind).
Team Engagement Exercise: Conduct a collective exercise where the team critiques the vision constructively, rephrases it to align with team values, and gauge personal interests. This exercise is pivotal as it brings the problem-solving aspect of the team closer to their individual motivations.
Balancing Involvement: Avoid a constant reliance on the most senior engineer for all cases of multi-year projects. This practice not only hinders the growth of others but may also diverge from their aspirations. Strive for a balanced approach, ensuring that every team member has opportunities to contribute meaningfully.
Depending on the size of the problem, set up a working group and align roles based on career growth trajectory. These are just some tools to create an environment where each individual can feel empowered, notice that you did not empower anyone. For some you might need to spend more time checking in regularly (towards delegation), for others you can be more hand-off (traditional empowerment).
This is an extremely helpful example to understand that it is not one or the other. It depends and with time you have to traverse that spectrum to find the right balance that works for your team.
Today we discussed the delicate balance between “Empower” and “Delegate”. How slight deviation can result in more engaged, dedicated workforce working towards the same goal with different incentives in mind. One thing to keep in mind, a leader’s job is not to empower others, but to systematically align organizational goals to individual incentive structure and let people feel self-empowered, giving them more power to do what they do the best!
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