The document discusses the art of delegation for building effective teams. It emphasizes establishing trust through clear communication and feedback. An "Items of Importance" system is recommended where team members regularly update the leader on key events and discussions in writing. Proper delegation involves matching tasks to individuals' skills and providing opportunities to develop new skills over time. Periodic reviews should assess delegation capacities and identify gaps to address through goals, hiring, or training. The goal is to empower teams through transparency, accountability and motivation to achieve excellence.

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Part 3 of 3:
The Art of Delegation
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Building Team Effectiveness
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High Growth Technology Businesses
Dave Litwiller
Three Part Series – January, 2021
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3. DELEGATION
• Requires the delegator being:
• An instigator
• A priority setter
• An integrator
• The person who keeps the trains running on time
• As well as being watchful and attentive to:
• Misunderstandings
• Pockets of resistance
• Insufficient delegee priority
• Fatigue or distraction

4. DELEGATION
• Necessary conditions to achieve delegation without abdication, and benefit
from the full collective intelligence of the team
• Foundational is building and sustaining trust in human relationships, which
comes from predictability, knowing what others will do in a variety of
circumstances
• Verifying that communication has been transmitted, received and interpreted
correctly
• Providing feedback on an ongoing basis – Needs to be quick, and balanced
• Small, early corrections are much more valuable for employees and the business
than later, bigger changes
• Being a good leader means being a good follower, some of the time, to let the
collective intelligence of the team bubble up

5. DELEGATION
• The crux of delegation in a high speed, collaborative environment:
• Keeping everyone au courant, to have the best chance of decentralized decision
making being correct, and based on facts

6. DELEGATION
• One model: Items of importance (IoI) system
• Daily or weekly, written, push communication from all collaborators to leader
• Covers: Main events of past time interval, including summary of significant verbal
communications internally and externally
• Leader prepares similar summary shared back to team, and the leader’s peers
• Benefits of IoI system in a high velocity environment
• People are more careful about their facts when committing in writing
• Misunderstandings are reduced
• People get fast at this once they get over initial learning
• Fosters fast, tight integration up, down and across the org

7. DELEGATION
• Fit the task to the person … to the extent possible
• Know which team members want to stretch and are capable of doing so, and
which ones are operating at their velocity limit
• Map the strongest individual contributors to the most demanding parts of the
work plan
• Bandwidth matching is especially important with the outsized productivity impact of
the highest performers
• People need to move out of their comfort zone as the price of learning
• Some do this naturally
• Some need to be pushed, but can do it
• Some won’t do it, even under strong encouragement
• There is a short-term productivity impact to enriching skills, since people need to
be encouraged to do work in areas they’re not initially as strong at

8. DELEGATION
• Fit the task to the person … to the extent possible (cont’d)
• The examples the company sets as the ultimate forms of technical and
managerial achievement will be emulated by many
• Set those examples carefully; your culture and values are what you promote
• Those beacons will establish the affinity of many staff and managers to various
forms of delegation and skill expansion over time
• Different project and business life cycle phases require a shifting profile of skills

9. DELEGATION
• Periodically review delegation capacity and conduct gap analyses
• What and who the leader needs to further develop in the team for the leader to
be able to level up an orbit
• Reflecting those development goals for team members in OKRs/OKAs and
profiles of new hires

10. DELEGATION
• Building delegation capacity in a team as the leader:
• Getting team members to be able to concisely articulate the evolving goals and
objectives of the team
• Similarly, the team leader understanding the skills and development goals of the
team’s members over the expected duration of the project
• Teaching team members to ask the right questions
• Building discipline of going to the source, to get the most reliable data
• Quickly creating a handful of options to solve any particular problem, before
narrowing in on a preferred solution
• Target time allocation: 1/3 for leader’s decision; 2/3 for team input, modification,
and implementation planning in order for the team to take ownership of the
outcome

11. DELEGATION
• The leader can be happy, but never satisfied
• Always be building a culture of striving to do better

12. DELEGATION
• Amy Edmondson, on harmonizing team effectiveness with psychological
safety:
• What psychological safety is not:
• People agreeing with each other for the sake of being nice
• Unequivocal praise or unconditional support
• Becoming “comfortable” at work
• It is about candor, and openness, which thrives in an environment of mutual
respect
• “Neither is psychological safety all that is required to deliver high performance.
Not even close…It’s not the fuel that powers the car.”
• “In any challenging industry setting, leaders…must set high standards and
inspire and enable people to reach them. In other words…leaders must motivate
people to do their very best work by inspiring them, coaching them, providing
feedback, and making excellence a rewarding experience”

13. SUMMARY
Building and Leading Effective Teams:
• Consciously act as a role model
• Deliver strong results in the right way - a culture of results
• Build, develop, and lead empowered and diverse teams
• Motivate others with an achievable vision for the future

14. FURTHER DISCUSSION
For additional discussion about building team effectiveness in high growth
technology businesses:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca