Delegation and Escalation

No one likes being micromanaged. When you do so, and when you fail to delegate, you will face multiple problems, including:

• You won’t have enough time for more important things
• You’re not using the potentials in your team
• You’ll miss the buy-in of team members

We should delegate. However, there are also some problems with delegation. Most notably, sometimes important decisions are made in lower levels of hierarchy, where people do not have the required high-level understanding.

The fifth core principle is Manage by Exception. 

It provides you with a structured system of delegation and escalation. We recognize the project targets (time, cost, scope, quality, etc.) and define tolerances for each level. For example, we say that the team leader is responsible for making decisions that do not have monetary consequences larger than €10,000. Then, if the monetary consequence is lower than that, we expect the higher manager to let the team leader handle it, and when it’s higher, we expect the team leader to escalate it to the higher level. 

That’s it for the fifth principle. Let’s move on to the next one… for tomorrow of course. My question this time is: what should be your focus, the work, or the product? What’s the consequence of each approach?