How to Teach Employees Independence. Part 1

Let’s start with a definition of delegation. Delegation is handing over part of your responsibility to another person. When a manager delegates a task to someone, they don’t shed the responsibility entirely, they only hand over a piece of it. That handover is directly connected to independence: the more independent the person doing the work, the more responsibility you can hand over to them.

Not everyone needs to delegate

Let’s start with a disclaimer: not everyone needs to delegate. For instance, people who are in business in order to fulfil themselves through their own labour don’t have to.

Picture a family workshop making custom shoes: if the craftsmen enjoy making shoes with their hands, if they take pleasure in the process and don’t want to turn into a shoe corporation, then delegation would only get in the way of that fulfilment.

If the main motivation is to get joy out of creative work, and the business isn’t oriented towards fast growth, if the system is compact and plans to stay that way, you can keep doing everything yourselves.

Another case where you can skip delegating is small companies with a team of up to 15 people. This is about teams busy with roughly the same, well-understood kind of work — say, 15 people working on three websites. In that case the structure is usually flat, everyone reports to the manager, and it’s fine that the manager is also the one making the decisions.

As the team grows — to 25 people, say — areas appear that the manager doesn’t have the resources or the attention for, and then there’s no getting around delegation. That said, if a small team is working on unusual, risky or urgent tasks, you’ll have to start delegating earlier.

In this article we’ll be talking about delegation in the context of a fast-growing system.

The time of competent managers is the scarcest resource

In any company the scarcest resource is the time of competent managers. By “managers” here we mean executives, entrepreneurs. The company’s growth depends on the amount of attention and time a competent manager spends. And if a manager doesn’t delegate tasks, they turn into the bottleneck link.

Picture this: an entrepreneur has a talent for finding new niches that can be scaled fast. If they do everything themselves — look for the niche, look for premises, test marketing channels, keep the books, hire specialists and supervise them — it quickly turns out that the company’s growth is limited by the amount of time the entrepreneur can spend on those tasks. And to keep from turning into the bottleneck link, they need to delegate.

Eliyahu Goldratt is the author of the theory of constraints; he proposes looking at an organization as a system of links. The key idea of the theory is that a system has one bottleneck, and the efficiency and stability of the entire system depend on the efficiency and throughput of that one place.

If we’re talking about innovative entrepreneurship, it is always in a zone of high uncertainty — otherwise it wouldn’t be innovative. In innovative companies there’s no way to lay everything down in written procedures: the pace of change is too high and there are too many decision points. There are no standard instructions; people make decisions themselves inside their area of responsibility, which means they have to be independent agents.

A call centre where you have to answer calls from a script is a different matter. Telling people to answer calls is hard to call delegation, because in that case they have no opportunity to make decisions: they act by the instructions, like robots. By delegation we mean assigning a task to an independent agent, not to a human automaton.

So it turns out that delegation is tightly bound up with a term like independence.

A person’s independence is measured by the time a manager spends on them

A person’s independence is measured by the amount of time a manager has to spend in order to get a result out of them. The less time a manager spends on a person, and the more complex the tasks that person can handle, the higher the degree of their independence — and therefore of their value to the company.

For instance, a company has two people who were both told to find new clients. The first one took the task and came back with five clients. The second took the task but didn’t start on it until the manager reminded him. Then he started spamming on social media during working hours, even though company rules forbid it — the manager had to step in again. Then he brought in five clients, but it turned out they didn’t need the company’s services. The manager stepped in again, reminded him, corrected course, and after a while the person completed the task.

The results in this example are the same, but the manager spent an hour on the first person and eight on the second. Which means the first one is more independent.

To hand a person a task and get a result without extra management, you have to teach them independence.

More on the algorithm of delegation in this article.

Independence has to be taught

Independence is a quality that has to be cultivated. A person can’t reach a high level of independence if they have no experience working on tasks in the zone of proximal development — if, for example, all they ever do is what they already know how to do. And no experience working on complex tasks, for instance in a zone of high uncertainty.

You can’t teach a person independence if you:

— Don’t give them hard tasks;

— Don’t give them the right to make mistakes;

— Don’t let them make decisions themselves;

— Don’t give them feedback.

So it turns out that to grow an independent employee you have to give them hard but manageable tasks, the right to make mistakes, and quality feedback.

(Hard but manageable tasks + the right to make mistakes + quality feedback) * repeat until done = an independent person

Besides hard tasks in the zone of proximal development, there is another source of independence — when a person takes an entrepreneurial stance and goes off to learn from the outside world. But people like that usually run their own business rather than work for someone else. So that route doesn’t work for a company.

In employment, people can only learn independence in the environment the company creates. And the harder and more aggressive that environment is, the more independent the people on the team are. But there’s an important condition: people have to want that difficulty and perceive it as a challenge rather than as idiocy. Only under that condition will a company be able to grow independent people — the kind who will solve hard tasks in a zone of high uncertainty.

The task has to be manageable — like in the gym: if a beginner squats with 100 kilos on the bar, he’ll get an injury instead of muscle, but if he starts with an empty bar and gradually adds weight, he’ll get pleasure, muscle growth and strength.

If a company wants to have a team of independent people a few years from now — say, in order to enter the global market or put together a big team — it has to delegate and allow mistakes starting today. The more rarely a company gives people responsibility, the more slowly they grow. Yes, today it’s easier to do it yourself than to explain to somebody else what to do and how, check the result and fix the mistakes, but with that approach, five years from now the person will still not be independent.

The story of delegation and independence also fits the example of the army, where orders are not up for discussion. If a soldier thinks the general gave him a stupid or incomprehensible order, he can’t ask questions or argue — he has to do what he was told.

That’s a way of solving simple or made-up problems, like painting the grass: one uniform order is handed to a large number of people, and the general says, “You are all painting the grass, everyone has paint and a brush, take them and go, I’ll come back in two hours and check.” And why anyone would paint grass with a brush, whether the task could be solved more efficiently — bring in a paint sprayer, say, or plant a proper lawn — doesn’t matter.

Any manager, whatever their management style, economizes on their own resource, otherwise the system chokes. But you can economize either by standardizing the order, as in the example above, or by raising the level of independence of your employees and the complexity of the tasks you can hand them. For fast-growing companies the second option is the better fit.

From intern to manager: how people master something new

There’s a little ladder that shows how a child masters the world. This ladder isn’t the invention of the author of this article, it’s a reworking of material by the psychologist Elkonin, a student of Vygotsky, who is considered the iconic Soviet child psychologist. It’s hard to say how scientific the knowledge about the ladder is, but it’s definitely applicable.

The ladder shows how a child masters the world, but anyone masters a new subject area in that same order — designers, programmers and doctors included. Which rung of the ladder a person is standing on determines the type of tasks and the format of the feedback.

The ladder has seven rungs, which can be divided into three zones: learning, dialogue of equals, and source of expertise.

Zone — learning

The rung and what it’s like:

1. The level of objects: the person studies the basics — learns what a typeface is, and what colour harmony is.
2. The level of interaction: learns to combine objects, for instance to combine a typeface and a colour in a logo.
3. The level of action: recognizes and reproduces the mentor’s patterns. Learns to do it the way the mentor does, while still not understanding why and what for it should be done exactly that way.

What tasks you can set: Training or toy tasks — ones that aren’t in the critical zone, or tasks with a low cost of error. These tasks are compared against a reference standard: you have to do it as well as your experienced colleagues do.

Zone — dialogue of equals

The rung and what it’s like:

1. The level of dialogue: you have to take the person’s position into account, talk to them as an equal, and judge their work by the effectiveness of the decisions rather than against a reference standard.
2. The level of the feat: the person wants to get confirmation of their own exceptionality.

What tasks you can set: Combat tasks and real problems.

Zone — source of expertise

The rung and what it’s like:

1. The level of theory: the person generalizes their experience of working in the subject area and arrives at a coherent theory of how everything works. There’s a risk that the person will decide they know the truth. This distortion is explained in more detail by the Dunning–Kruger effect.

2. The level of paradox: understands that any model is incomplete, and that other people’s pictures of the world may differ. Takes the difference in pictures of the world into account when reasoning.

   Mastering the level of paradox lets a person treat other people’s experience as more valuable, and be a good mentor.

What tasks you can set: Tasks of high complexity in a zone of uncertainty, and mentoring.

Next we’ll talk in more detail about each zone, and after that about goal synchronization, feedback and firing people.

The learning zone: just do it like I do

Inside the learning zone there are three levels: objects, interaction and action. If we compare it to how a child studies the world, at the first level — objects — the child learns that there are apples, stacking-ring toys, shoes, feet. And a programmer, for instance, learns about operators, syntax, the system environment.

Then comes the level of interaction between objects. The child learns that you can kick a stacking-ring toy with your foot, and the programmer learns that with an operator and syntax you can print “Hello, world!” to the screen.

The next level is action. At this level the person becomes interested not in objects and their relative positions but in actions and their sequence: they’re looking for the answer to the questions “What are we doing? In what order do we have to do it to get the result, like in a recipe?”

At the learning level a person doesn’t have experience yet, but they do have a recipe, an instruction, an example, by which they repeat the mentor’s pattern and solve tasks. It’s like driving a car. Until a person has passed their driving test and started feeling confident on the road, their opinion about which driving style is better isn’t competent. They haven’t mastered the basics yet.

Same thing in design: if a designer doesn’t understand what visual language is, what composition is, how a typeface is built and how people perceive a frame, their opinion on the choice of visual devices gets compared against the art director’s reference opinion. The designer’s opinion is considered good if it resembles the “correct”, “reference” opinion.

This zone is where interns are, and the company still gives them toy, training tasks. These shouldn’t be urgent, critical tasks or tasks with a high cost of error.

How to give feedback: in this zone there is a reference standard — the pattern the person is supposed to reproduce — which means feedback can be given in the categories of “good/bad”, “right/wrong”.

Dialogue of equals: the intern becomes a full member of the team

In this zone the person forms a style and their own way of solving problems. They’ve already learned to reproduce the mentor’s patterns and have moved into the category of juniors or early mid-levels — they can be given combat tasks. There are two levels here: dialogue and the feat.

The level of dialogue. The manager moves away from evaluating in the “right/wrong” format and judges the solution not by how well it matches the reference standard but by its effectiveness. Room for dialogue appears, and the conversation has to be between equals.

At this level a person enters the state of “talk to me”. They may not say it outright, but they expect the manager to take their position into account when setting tasks. For them to keep growing, you have to let them feel like a respected professional and listen to their thoughts.

How to give feedback: at this level there’s no reference standard, so the feedback has to rest on an analysis of the experience of the person receiving it. For instance, you can say: “Seryoga, let’s work out how the problem is structured, how this works, and whether your solution is effective.”

The level of the feat. To continue the comparison with a person’s development as an individual, this is adolescence, when a person needs the world to confirm their exceptionality. That’s why adolescence is usually considered a difficult age: doing something destructive is easier than doing something constructive, and the amount of attention you get from the world comes out about the same.

How to give feedback: at this level a person wants confirmation that they’ve done something outstanding. It doesn’t have to be a World Design Championship trophy or money — it’s enough for the manager not to forget about the person. “Thanks, Seryoga, you’re a hell of a designer, where would we be without you” — that kind of praise works fine.

Source of expertise: theory and paradox

The source-of-expertise zone can be broken down into two levels: theory and paradox.

The level of theory. At this level the person understands how the subject area is built, sees the patterns and starts systematizing them. They may get the feeling that they’ve grasped the truth and are ready to carry it to the masses.

At the level of theory the person wants to share the truth and thinks that this is what feedback is. But in the state of “I know the truth”, a person voices an opinion not in order to help colleagues solve their task, but so that everyone can see how great he is. Here’s the difference: the person doesn’t analyse what happened with the colleagues, what the task is, what the context is — he tells them what conclusions he drew from his own experience. And he doesn’t take into account that his experience may not be relevant.

The person doesn’t analyse what happened with the colleagues, what the task is, what the context is — he tells them what conclusions he drew from his own experience.

Usually people react to the theorist’s opinion negatively: “Think you’re the smartest one here? You’re supposedly the same kind of specialist we are. Or do you have some special rank on your shoulders? Is there a halo glowing? Doesn’t look like it. So why are you standing here telling us how it should be done, when you don’t even know the context of our task? Go to hell!”

And from there the person has three options:

• Find himself a flock that will worship him;
• Live in constant stress and put his colleagues under stress;
• Move up to the next level of development.

How to give feedback: you’re experienced by now and you know how everything works around here. But let’s work out how people hear you and what they need from you. Let’s try looking at the situation through the eyes of the different participants?

Sometimes people get stuck at the level of theory. That situation is better prevented than solved on the spot, otherwise you’ll have to break the person. You can put it roughly like this: “First of all, you’re part of a team. On your own you can be as wonderful as you like, nobody cares. All that matters is how you work in a team with other people: whether you strengthen them or weaken them. My job as a manager is to make sure you strengthen each other. If I can’t manage that, then however valuable you are, we’ll part ways. Because a team is made of molecules, not of atoms, and an atom that doesn’t bond with the others, however valuable it is, is no damn use to anyone.”

The level of paradox. At this level the person understands that however coherent their concept of the world may be, there are other realities and they have a right to exist. At that moment they mature as a professional, know the subject area deeply and understand that there’s no single truth for everyone. The person keeps learning, keeps growing, and respects other people along the way.

If a person has got to this level, you can hand them the role of mentor or the development of other people. Usually problems and conflicts arise because the people managing the doers are standing on the earlier rungs: they either want the feat, or want to prove the truth to everyone. Whereas a person who has learned to treat someone else’s picture of the world as important, even though it differs from their own, won’t have those problems.

How to give feedback: in a way that helps the person reach their goals — that’s the general rule; I’ll talk about it and about goals in the second part of the article.