Delegation Assumes a Team You Might Not Have

Name the tradeoff out loud instead of quietly deciding to just work more hours.

Most delegation advice starts from the same place: You have people who report to you, and the work is deciding what to hand off and to whom. That’s useful if you’re running a department. But it’s less useful if you’re the one-person office, the new supervisor with a team of one, or the coordinator whose actual job is absorbing everyone else’s overflow.

If that’s you, “just delegate” has probably felt like advice for someone else’s job. But the instinct underneath that delegation—that you don’t have to carry everything alone—still applies. It just has to move in a different direction. When you can’t delegate down, you delegate up, or sideways.

Delegating Upward

This is renegotiating the scope or timeline with the person who gave you the task, instead of quietly absorbing it as-is. Say your supervisor asks for the enrollment summary by Friday, but Friday isn’t realistic without cutting corners on the two other things already on your plate. All too often, the instinct is to simply say yes anyway and figure it out later—usually by working nights and weekends. However, the right move instead is to put the tradeoff back where it belongs: “I can have the full summary by Tuesday next week, or I can have a first draft to you Wednesday and the polished version later on. Which do you need?” That’s not saying no. It’s giving the person who actually owns the priority the information they need to own it well, instead of finding out too late that something else quietly got dropped to make room.

Delegating Sideways

It is important to remember that this is trading, not dumping. A peer may be sitting on exactly the capacity or expertise you’re short on, and you’re sitting on something they need. The start of an academic year is full of small trades like this, even when no one’s actually calling them delegation. “I’ll cover your advising block Thursday if you can sit in on my committee meeting” moves work off your desk just as much as handing it to a direct report would do. So does trading a piece of the accreditation self-study you’re stuck on for a peer’s help drafting it, in exchange for taking a task off their plate that plays to your strengths instead. It’s delegation. It’s just horizontal, and it depends on someone naming the trade instead of assuming that the other person should just offer.