What is Delegation?

In the early days of a startup, you are the chief of everything. You write the code, you answer the support tickets, and you take out the trash. This creates a dangerous habit. You start to believe that the only way to get a job done right is to do it yourself. This belief is the primary ceiling on your company’s growth.

Delegation is the assignment of any authority to another person to carry out specific activities. It is the act of entrusting a task or responsibility to a subordinate while retaining accountability for the outcome.

For a founder, delegation is not just a time management tactic. It is the fundamental shift from being a freelancer to being a business owner. If you cannot delegate, you do not own a business. You own a job.

Delegation is often misunderstood as a binary switch. You either do it, or they do it. In reality, it is a spectrum of authority levels.

When you first delegate a task, you might say, “Look into this issue and give me the facts, I will decide what to do.” As trust builds, you move down the spectrum to “Look into the issue, propose a solution, and wait for my go ahead.” Eventually, you reach the ultimate goal: “Take care of this and just tell me what happened.”

Founders fail because they try to jump immediately to the end of the spectrum without building the necessary context. You have to train the judgment of your team before you can trust their execution.

The biggest trap in delegation is confusing it with abdication. These two concepts look similar on the surface because in both cases, you are not doing the work. The difference lies in the feedback loop.

Abdication is when you toss a task to someone and say, “Good luck, don’t bother me.” You have removed yourself from the process entirely. This usually leads to disaster, followed by the founder swooping in to fix the mess and declaring that “no one can do it as well as I can.”

Delegation requires active management. You define the objective. You set the constraints. You establish check-in points. You are still responsible for the final quality, even though your hands are not on the keyboard. You are effectively managing the outcome, not the method.

A major psychological hurdle is the drop in quality. It is true that you can probably do the task better than the person you are delegating to. You have more context and more experience.

However, you must embrace the 70 percent rule. If someone else can do the task at least 70 percent as well as you can, you should delegate it.

That remaining 30 percent gap is the price you pay for scalability. If you demand 100 percent perfection on every task, you will become the bottleneck for the entire organization. Your time is better spent on the high leverage activities that only you can do, such as setting the vision, raising capital, or hiring key executives.

Not every task should be delegated. Founders need a filter to decide what stays on their desk.

• Delegate: Repetitive tasks, administrative work, and technical tasks where you are not the expert.
• Keep: Strategy, culture definition, and high stakes negotiations.

If a task is repetitive, document the process and hand it off. If a task requires specialized skills you lack, hire an expert and hand it off. The goal is to make yourself useless in day to day operations so you can be useful in year to year strategy.