Don’t Be An Upward Delegator!
Are you an upward delegator? Upward delegation causes frustration for managers and may prevent you from advancing in your career. In this post, I will attempt to explain upward delegation and offer suggestions for avoiding it in your internships and jobs.
Delegation is the assignment of authority to another. Delegation typically occurs downstream in an organizational chart; those at higher levels in an organization make assignments and delegate authorities to those who occupy positions below theirs in the organizational structure. Managers must effectively delegate to free themselves up from doing more than one person can handle and to help their employees develop by taking on more responsibilities.
Upward delegation can take several forms, but it essentially involves a subordinate turning a delegated responsibility around and giving it back to a supervisor. In my experience, employees who engage in upward delegation are usually unaware of what they are doing, but ignorance does not make the behavior any less annoying to a manager or make the employee seem any more competent.
I learned about upward delegation early in my tenure with the New York Yankees. My boss, Mark Newman, then Yankees VP of Baseball Operations, had asked me to prepare a memo for his signature. He verbally gave me a few key points to include in the document but left the rest for me to fill in, expecting that I would return with a well-crafted memo that he would quickly skim, sign, and send off. Instead, I returned with a document that required further editing on his part and a couple sections that needed beefing up.
To his credit, Mark explained to me that my memo was an example of upward delegation and that it is not a desirable behavior. I had not previously heard the term upward delegation, but I immediately understood that I had caused Mark to do more work than if he had simply sat down to write the memo himself from scratch, which he did not have time to do. At that moment, I vowed to be more vigilant and check myself before bringing potentially incomplete or unfinished projects back to a supervisor to finish for me. As I advanced in my career to supervise others and to teach students, I developed a more personal understanding of Mark’s frustration with my assumption that he would finish my assignment for me on that occasion.
Not all bosses are as helpful as Mark was at pointing out a shortcoming so an employee can improve their job performance. You might be irritating your boss on a regular basis with upward delegation that you do not even recognize while your boss gradually loses faith in you.
Avoiding upward delegation begins by being more mindful of what a supervisor asks of you and more thorough in completing assignments and managing duties that have been delegated to you. If you have a job duty or other assigned responsibility, ask yourself, “Have I done everything I can possibly do to handle this myself before returning to my boss for direction or telling her that I am finished?” If the answer is that you could do more or that you could at least develop fully formed recommendations that your boss can quickly choose from, then get back to work. Do not rush back to your boss prematurely – if you do, you are essentially saying, “I’m finished putting any more of my time into this, now you finish it for me.”
For example, when my boss assigned me a new case to investigate at the NCAA or if I was at a crossroads as to how to proceed in one of my cases, I had two options. I could either go directly to my boss and ask, “What should I do?” or I could take time to consider the alternatives, develop two or three possibilities, carefully outline those possibilities, and then meet with my boss to lay out my recommendation and other possibilities and ask for her suggestion. In both cases, I needed the guidance of my boss, which is fine to request. But in the first scenario, I would basically be taking my case and handing it back to her to tell me what to do with it. That would require a significant investment of her time to dig into the details of the case, consider all the options, and then make a decision – work that her subordinate (me) should have done. In the second scenario, I spent the time performing research, outlining the crucial details my boss would need to know to make an efficient and informed decision, and developing any questions in advance that I needed answered so she would invest as little time and energy as possible helping me move my case forward.
I have one final example to share that recently happened to me. I am leading a group of students in an experiential learning course this semester, and they are developing marketing recommendations for a minor league team. Each student project team will present a fully developed theme night recommendation to team executives for possible implementation next season.
Last weekend, the students submitted their deliverables for my review before final presentations next week. One of the student groups sent me the following promotion plan as part of their deliverable document: “Lastly, we recommend that the Iowa Energy further promote this event to all fans and social media followers through the various channels they are engaged in (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.).”
Much like Mark Newman did with me 20 years ago, I explained to this group of students that they were engaging in upward delegation by essentially planning to tell the client, “Promote this theme night idea on social media and figure the rest out for yourselves.” The team executives want recommendations from the students on how to reach the audience that is most likely to respond to the ticket package offer and theme night the students developed, but that part of the presentation left all the work to the client. Needless to say, I sent those students back to the drawing board to develop a flyer, graphics, and strategies for utilizing social media as a creative communication channel. It is my hope that they will reflect on this instance of upward delegation the same way I did when Mark once gave me sage advice that has influenced me throughout my career.