Don't Do. Delegate!

I picked up this book at Fry's Electronics in Palo Alto, CA of all places. I very much liked the book because it introduced me to the concept of delegation as a management skill. Previous to this, having no exposure to literature on the subject, I knew that delegation was important but didn't have a good method to go about it. The book is concise and easy to read. I particularly liked their treatment of the subject of inserting controls in the process to monitor and guide one's delegatee. It made me realize that delegation is not about "trusting" people. Instead, it is about setting up a management process that causes work to be done by others, which greatly multiplies one's effectiveness as a manager. I think that many managers are ineffective as delegators because they feel that they should trust their subordinates and that if their trust is betrayed they think they must do it themselves. This is particularly true of engineers who have become managers. But this book tells us that delegation is not like that at all. Trust is not the issue. Setting up good controls and using them is the issue.