Are you a hands-on engineering manager, and how do you make decisions about delegation?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Delegation is a very important skill. As it shows your team members that you
struct them and is genuinely interested in their growth
urgency and importance - I evaluate the urgency of the task and the impact. If
the task is a time bound task which has signification impact on the customer
then I tend to do it myself to not put the team member on the spot. complexity -
If the complexity is high I oversee the task myself. I assess the potential risk
of delaying the task to the business and consider the impact on stakeholders
before making a decision. expertise and skill level - if the task maps with the
skills of the individual I like to delegate to promote development collaboration
- delegation can empower team towards autonomy which is good for developing
leaders
e.g.
I delegated running weekly RCA call for the platform team to the Architect in my
group
 * Expertise - In 2 quarters time, architect has build good knowledge about the
   overall system
 * Collaboration - Architect has run major cross team projects and showcased
   skills needed to collaborate with respect with other teams
 * Attention to detail - Architect was part of the meeting for 3 quarters and
   knew how to drive the post mortem meetings
 * Reverse shadow and feedback - I gave the opportunity to the architect to run
   the RCA call and did reverse shadow and provided feedback later.
 * Expectation setting - Setting up the right expectations for running the call
   and identification of the long term tech items for roadmap,
 * Review process - setup a biweekly cadence with architect to review this

Anonymous · Answer

1. Do I have the skills to do it and know how to do it? If yes, then I will
consider if this task needs to be done repeatedly? If yes, then I would delegate
it to a team member who I think has the skills to do it so that they get
familiar with the task and can do it next time without supervision. I would also
consider my load while deciding to delegate or not.
2. If there is a task for which only I have the skill but that task is not
urgent then I will delegate it to a team member giving them resources and  time
to learn the skills needed and complete the task. If it is urgent then I will do
it but plan to upskill a team for future.
3. If I believe a task can be done better by a team member then I would prefer
to delegate.
4. I will delegate a task if that task is a routine task and can be distributed
to a group of team members making sure one person does not become a bottleneck.

Anonymous · Answer

I would consider if this task can be stepping stone for someone to grow into a
role, this task would be assigned to them.
If this work is impactful and has visiblity to Executives I would assign it to
Senior member who can be owner and i have handsoff approach.
If this is a repeatable with less complexity task I would assign it to a Junior
Engineer for them to take care of automation.
I would communicate the reasons of delegation and set clear expectations for the
task completion.
For all the tasks I would gauge the current skills of the candidate and provide
coaching mentoring  and skill development for them to handle the task.
I would share an example where there was a high impact feature to be built. I
engaged a staff engineer for Scoping and architectual design and engaged juniors
for coding tasks.The junior members were provided coaching on the translation of
architectural design to Service definition.

Are you a hands-on engineering manager, and how do you make decisions about delegation?

Answers