.png)
When “Delegate More” Isn’t the Answer :: Is This Actually a Firm Capacity Problem?
By Christine Shimoda
Part 3 of a 3 part series on Delegation
You’ve identified work you don’t need to do yourself. You’re willing to give someone else meaningful ownership.
There’s just one problem.
To whom?
This is the point where a lot of conventional advice about delegation stops being particularly useful.
“Delegate more” assumes you know who has capacity. It assumes you know what experience people have, what they’re ready for, what they’re interested in learning and what else they’re carrying.
In many firms, that information is incomplete, informal or invisible.
At that point, delegation may no longer be primarily an individual leadership problem.
It may be a capacity and resourcing problem.
Familiarity is an efficient default, until it isn’t
When work needs to move quickly, lawyers tend to go to people they already trust.
That’s rational. You know they can do the work. They understand your expectations. The cost of getting them started is lower.
But over time, a pattern can emerge.
The people with experience keep receiving opportunities because they have experience. The people without experience don’t receive those opportunities because they haven’t demonstrated experience yet.
The reliable people become overloaded. Everyone else remains underdeveloped. And critical knowledge becomes concentrated among the people who already have the least capacity to share it.
We’ve created a loop.
One way out is to change the question from “Who can do this?” to “Who could become capable of doing this?”
That introduces development into the resourcing decision.
But it still assumes you know who those people are.
You can’t personally delegate your way out of structural under-resourcing
This is where individual skill reaches its limit.
Recent research suggests that not every delegation problem can be solved by becoming a better delegator. In her Harvard Business Review article, Why Aren’t I Better at Delegating?, Elsbeth Johnson, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, identifies structural under-resourcing as one of the barriers leaders can face. Sometimes there simply aren’t enough appropriate resources available. When that’s the case, the answer isn’t better delegation technique. It requires an organizational response.
That distinction is particularly important in professional services.
If I can’t see who’s available, don’t know what experience people have, can’t find someone at the appropriate level, or know that everyone capable of receiving the work is already overloaded, telling me to become a better delegator misses the problem.
We need to ask different questions.
How visible is capacity across the firm? How far forward can we see it? How do lawyers discover who has relevant experience or wants to develop it? And who is responsible for looking across all of this rather than expecting each lawyer to solve the resourcing puzzle independently?
Capacity isn’t just availability
Someone having five free hours doesn’t necessarily make them the right person for five hours of work.
Effective resourcing involves at least three considerations: capacity, capability and opportunity.
Do they have room?
Can they do the work, or can they do it with an appropriate level of support?
Would the assignment help build capability the firm will need in the future?
And there’s another perspective worth considering: Do delegators and delegatees experience delegation the same way?
In conversations with lawyers, we’ve heard delegatees describe receiving good context, support and feedback while delegators in the same broader environment remain frustrated that delegation isn’t consistently creating the ownership, efficiency or results they want.
Both experiences can be true.
Perhaps they’re measuring different things. The delegatee may be asking, “Was I set up to succeed?” while the delegator is asking, “Did this ultimately create the capacity and ownership I needed?”
That’s a useful gap for firms to explore.
Two questions need to coexist
Delegation conversations often swing too far in one direction. Either the individual needs to get better at letting go, or the firm needs to fix its systems.
Usually, both deserve examination.
So when delegation isn’t happening, we like to hold two questions at the same time:
What can I do differently?
And:
What might our firm need to make easier?
The first keeps individual agency in the conversation. The second prevents us from treating every organizational constraint as an individual leadership failure.
Because if a firm wants work to move to the right people, at the right level, at the right time, it needs more than lawyers who are willing to delegate.
It needs the infrastructure that allows them to do it well.
How does your firm operationalize capacity and resourcing? If that’s the real obstacle to delegation, we’d be interested in the systems, practices and questions firms are using to solve it.
Comments