The Lost Art of Delegation
At some point along the way, in our race towards agile … and eventually Scrum, we left the practice of delegation in the past. No one seems to even remember what it is. For that, our industry is worse off.
As a refresher, I took another look at Steven Covey’s explanation of delegation from his classic: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Move over Scrum, here comes something leaner.
Two Types of Delegation
Covey separates delegation into two types: gofer delegation and stewardship delegation.
Gofer delegations means “Go for this, go for that, do this, do that, and tell me when it’s done.”
Sound familiar? It should. Pull a task from the backlog. Report on your progress every morning. Finish the task. Pull the next one. Chant “Yesterday, Today, No Blockers“ three times. Bow to the cardboard cut-out of Jeff Sutherland.
But this is the weaker form of delegation. Covey continues:
[Some managers] don’t know how to set up a full delegation so that another person is committed to achieve results. Because they are focused on methods, they become responsible for results…
Stewardship delegation is focused on results instead of methods. It gives people a choice of method and makes them responsible for results.
When management focuses on communicating a vision for desired results instead of the methods for accomplishing them, programmers start to feel ownership and autonomy. They come up with methods on their own — innovative ones too. They take pride in their work. They become self-managing. Like a greasy toy from McDonald’s, wind them up, point them in the right direction, and let them go. This is called stewardship delegation.
Developers that are engaged and feel ownership in their work make better software. They worker harder and faster and don’t burn out because this type of work is restorative.
More than increasing productivity, quality, and developer happiness, stewardship delegation also scales better. If a manager tries to oversee each programmer task, they quickly become overwhelmed. But one manager can lead a dozen or more self-managing engineers — each with much better output.
Scrum has lots of managers — to account for all the gofer delegation going on. Scrum Masters direct meetings, guard the process, monitor progress, and create reports. Product Owners define the work — they own the backlog. They add, divide, and refine individual tasks. Team leads define software architecture and assist Product Owners with task definitions. And we haven’t even counted the person that actually has manager in their title! Your line manager does 1:1’s and performance evaluations as well as pushing agendas of their own.
And no software organization would every be complete until you’ve sprinkled in a few extra product/project managers and a software architect or two. When you look at it, there is one chaperone for every kid at the dance. It’s a gofer paradise.
The Rules of the Game
There are rules to stewardship delegation, however. Read Covey’s explanation for more details, but here is a summary of the five areas of “clear, up-front mutual understanding and commitment” that must exist in to make stewardship delegation function properly.
Desired Results
“Create a clear, mutual understanding of what needs to be accomplished, focusing on what, not how; results, not methods.”
Guidelines
“Identify the parameters within which the individual should operate.”
Resources
“Identify the human, financial, technical, or organizational resources the person can draw on to accomplish the desired results.”
Accountability
“Set up the standards of performance that will be used in evaluating the results and the specific times when reporting and evaluation will take place.”
Consequences
“Specify what will happen, both good and bad, as a result of the evaluation.”
Management still has to think about what they want and how they want it. But they have to think at a higher, more strategic level. On top of strategy, they have to think more about what their programmers need to succeed and stay motivated. You can see that delegation (and good management in general) is as much an art as a science.
But the most crucial step comes last. After establishing these five understandings, managers must let go (deep breaths) and trust their programmers to get the job done. If they can’t do this, all the rest else is worthless. Even the best planned stewardship delegation can slide back into gofer delegation. Trust is the essential ingredient.
Green and Clean
To illustrate further, Covey relates his personal experience delegating yard work to his son.
During a family meeting, Covey recruited volunteers for several chores around the house. Ambitiously, his son volunteered to take over the yard work. Being young and inexperienced, however, he needed some additional direction. So, Covey took him to their neighbor’s house where the yard was well-kept. He used his neighbor’s good example, as well as a simple phrase, Green and Clean, to illustrate the desired result.
Because he knew his son still probably had no idea how to accomplish the assignment, he gave some helpful training but was careful to qualify his instructions, so that his son knew he was still in charge.
“You’re free to do it any way you want, except paint it. But I’ll tell you how I’d do it if it were up to me.”
To further encourage him, he offered to help anytime he was available. Then he finished by setting up a simple reporting schedule:
“Twice a week the two of us will walk around the yard, and you can show me how it’s coming.”
In the end, it was an incredible success:
He took care of that yard. He kept it greener and cleaner then it had ever been under my stewardship. He even reprimanded his brothers and sisters if they left so much as a gum wrapper on the lawn
This story demonstrates Covey’s key areas of “mutual understanding” as well as the motivational power of trust — inspiring even a young boy to great productivity and ownership.
Results not Methods
Scrum focuses on task creation instead of projects or areas of responsibility — it is essentially gofer delegation. Its focus more on methods than results.
Exacerbating the problem, in Scrum every task must be divided into smaller and smaller pieces — until the backlog is fully “groomed”. Such small tasks will of force be more focused on implementation details than results and thus insure that no interesting work will ever be delegated.
Imagine how differently Covey’s lawn delegation example would have gone had he used Scrum. Picture him sitting down at his computer and opening up his trusty Jira. First creating “epics”: mowing, watering, trash removal, weeding. Then creating individual tasks: check and fill up the gas can; check and fill the mower’s gas tank; change the oil in mower if needed. Oh! But what about the edger? You can see where this is going.
Hours later, after all the tasks are created he would need to start the prioritizing. Should edging come first? So the clippings are collected by the mower? But perhaps trash collection should come before everything else. And how often should each task be performed, and on which day?
Then, every two weeks, he would have sat down with his son and asked him which tasks he thought he could complete in the coming two weeks. Hopefully every task has an estimate — if he is diligent about backlog grooming.
Finally, every morning, he would ask his son what he did the day before, what he was planning to do today, and if there was anything blocking him. “You didn’t do anything yesterday? You played with your friends?”
Can you see the difference in motivation? In ownership? In self-respect?
Too Many Constraints
Scrum isn’t the only enemy to stewardship delegation however. Software companies today are also highly constrained. Nearly all means and methods are assigned somewhere up the chain of command. Some common mandatory development practices are test driven development, continuous integration/deployment/delivery, pair programming, branching models, approved languages, approved operating systems, approved cloud providers, approved libraries, approved design patterns, mandatory code reviews, deployment checklists and coding standards. While there is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, there is danger in mandating every perceived best practice. Too many constraints leaves little room for experimentation and innovation. This loss in autonomy comes with a cost to motivation and productivity. When evaluating guidelines, remember they “should be as few as possible to avoid methods delegation.“ Resist the urge to constrain everything. Leave most of it up to the programmer doing the work.
Point out the potential failure paths, what not to do, but don’t tell them what to do. Keep the responsibility for results with them—to do whatever is necessary within the guidelines.
Conclusion
Software companies need to graduate from the task based management strategies of gofer delegation and move up to the more powerful practice of stewardship delegation, letting trust rather than control be their guide. When they do, I am confident the results will be astonishing. In the words of Covey:
Trust is the highest form of motivation. It brings out the very best in people.
Sources
all quotations come from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey