Delegating Work

"managerial leverage means it is very simple... If I am kind of pushing you to kind of move your organization forward, then that's no leverage. What's leverage is if you're telling me what you should do and how you can push the company forward, that's leverage, then I'm getting more than I'd have if you weren't there"

"One of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule. Someone will bring me a thing. A lot of times we feel obligated to weigh in and help. I'll be like, 'Nope, but look, I think you've got it. I think the challenges you're facing are the right challenges.'"

"Mark, we joke inside of Meta, to this day, we call it the eye of Sauron. When Mark has determined that the thing that you're working on is the most important thing, there is no detail too small for him to notice."

"I run everyone through the culture of Canva. One of those sections is on giving away your Lego, finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering."

"Finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering is really what giving away your Lego is about. And we still encourage everyone to do that, to think about those moments where they need to level up in their impact, how they can bring their team along with them, how they can pass on their experience and help everyone really have a tremendous impact with the skills that they have."

"I also think people don't delegate enough. So, if you don't delegate, then you get overwhelmed because your team doesn't know how to do anything, because you haven't bothered to spend the time delegating, which actually takes more time initially, usually, you have to teach people whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do."

"There's this negative term called micromanagement. I think there's a difference between micromanagement, which is like telling people exactly what to do, and being in the details. Being in the details is what every responsible company's board does to the CEO. That doesn't mean the board is telling them what to do. But if you don't know the details, how do you know people are doing a good job?"

"I remember reading a blog post by Ben Horowitz saying that a lot of people tell product led founders or engineering led founders to step away and delegate their product to other people, but suddenly they've delegated away the thing they're best at. The thing that is hardest for them to replace."

"Leaders often believe... that they have to have all the answers... I believe a leader's job is to ensure the best answer is found. It doesn't matter whether it comes from me or anywhere else in the organization."

"The worst thing a leader can do is make an organization too dependent on them. If you care about building a sustainable long-term organization and a legacy, then it behooves you not to make the organization very dependent on you."

"Don't be afraid again to let go of things that you think are superpowers... Many times your superpowers that brought you to this point and made you successful, many times you think that if you let it go you won't be successful and it's frightening."

"I think that the advice that he's referencing here is just how important it is to not overdelegate and for the founders to stay close to things, as well as watch out for the trap of hiring super senior people with fancy resumes, really early in a startup. I think that's what he's referencing there. And again, this is definitely one of those very basic things that we find ourselves repeating a lot where they're like, 'Yeah, yeah, I get it. Don't overdelegate. We get it, Dalton.' And then two years later they're like, 'Wow, we overdelegated. We need to go clean that up.'"

"The first way that companies die is from founders not letting go... But then the second way that companies kill themselves is the founders get too far away."

"When you're hiring super senior, whip smart executives to work for you, they don't want to be told what to do, they want to have a grand vision that they're excited about... Give us a vision, give us problems to solve and let us do it for you."

"The ideal position for any product owner is to be fully autonomous. And again, it doesn't mean that you will never be challenged, but if when you're challenged, you can show all the logic behind decisions you've made behind the roadmap. And even if metrics are not yet there, you will still let's say have this credit of trust to keep building things the way you want to build them."

"I don't want to have any direct reports... I have learned that I suck at management. I'm a reasonably smart person. I think I could become passively okay at management with some training... I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something. I would rather take those same calories and take the things that I'm good at"

"There are I think a lot of people who when you put them on the thing that they are super interested and fired up about will outperform your wildest imagination of what's possible. Put in the wrong effort where they're not motivated, yeah, they will be fine. If you can actually understand what people care about and then map them with their interests to the right projects, it is just so helpful."

"You have to shift from doer to editor is the way I think about it. You have to shift from, 'My job is to do the work,' to, 'My job is to make the work better. My job is to plus the work, to review the work, to help other people solve problem.'"

"oftentimes I can find other people to do the work I was doing. So instead of basically spending time doing my job, I networked first within Netscape."

"How can you hire people whom you expect to make decisions without running them through you if you can't tolerate them making a decision that you disagree with? You want to build a scaled leadership team, you have to be willing to have them make boneheaded decisions."

"It's very, very tempting to float up here as a leader and say, 'Hey, you take that hill over there. You guys do this over here.' When in fact, where you really learn where the challenges are, or the problems or the successes is by just being there with the people in the trenches on one of the things, whichever one seems hardest or most complicated."

"When I hire people to help me do a thing, it's because there is this implicit trust in what they do and that that's why I want to work with them... I'm just like, 'Hey, this is your thing. You're the expert. What do you think? Let me give you the parameters and the things that we have to think about. Because you know more about wood resources, and you know more about the cabinet spacing, and whatever, you tell me what you think is going to work best based on all these things that I laid out for you.'"

"Founders often start in control, very micromanaging, just driving the ship. And then as the company grows, they delegate and empower and then things start to slow down and then they come back, play the Shiva and take control again... the universe goes through the exact same phases. So if you study Indian mythology, you'll see that there's a Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh cycles and every yugg As it’s called, goes through these three phases all the time."

"The power of a support system to be able to do what you do, I mean, you are an extension, my leverage, my everything... everyone should not only know the power and leverage of their person, but the level of appreciation and celebration you need to have for them is just huge."

"The key is to go and look at your day. It's not that you figure out what it is and do more of that, it's that you figure out what it isn't and eliminate that and then naturally, you'll be drawn toward what it is that you love."

"The one other one I refer to often is I love the Eisenhower Matrix, which is also known as the four Ds. So it's do, defer, delegate, delete... I write everything down at the end of every day, I go through and I either do delegate, defer, delete, and it really helps you clear a lot of stuff out of your brain."

"And so you kind of wear a hundred hats and then you have to be able to give away those hats to other people that can then do that way better than yourself."

"You have to grow as fast as your company is growing if you really want to take advantage, both learning to give away what you've gotten good at and move on to the next shiny pile of Legos."

"Your challenge is going to be to share the steering wheel with the person or the set of people you are managing... I think it's more like the sidecar on the motorcycle, where person's driving the motorcycle and I'm on the sidecar and whether I like it or not, I'm attached, but I have this relatively specific role of giving counsel."

"I have contractors, but I hire contractors for very specific roles. And I create systems such that we can do it asynchronously. And of course, I'll have conversations with them if they want to jump on a call. But I optimize for people that want asynchronous and work on those specific things."

"He realized he was the blocker on every decision, every business decision, every product decision... he decided to create squads... shifting from the role of deciding on everything to coaching."

"Your ideal goal is to lead in a scalable way, which means you feel really confident about the direction of your team and your team has the autonomy to move in that direction. There's another really effective way of leading, which is selective micromanagement, which if you don't feel confident in the direction that your team is moving, the right answer is not to be hands-off and to let them go in that wrong direction. The right answer is to micromanage, but do it in a very tactical and a very temporary way so that you can help them understand what is the right direction moving forward so that you can then pull back."

"What I did is, I hired a really great president, I went from eight direct reports to two, and the amount of time that I spend on product design, technology and marketing went up from six to 7% to about 60% to 70% of my week."

"The number one thing is context, no control. That's the reason why we're always encouraging people to see themselves as a business owner."

"Context, no control. That means you actually can go above and beyond to really think about your whole business problem as your own problem and your piece is maybe one part of it to solve the puzzle, but how do you actually solve the puzzle by connecting all the dots together, we're encouraging all the people to think like that way and by that I think we kind of mentally break out those walls."

"It is very important that the leader at any level needs to be situational. You cannot always down to the wheat and you cannot really distance yourself from the reality. So you need to find the balance to really get engaged and also see yourself out there to getting, I would say, getting deeper into the problems, to identify the problems, and then you're able to perform even better."

"Delegation is- is a classic founder challenge. You know, I- I'm just generally a controlling person. That's something I'm working on. And it's really hard sometimes when I have such strong opinions, and I'm very particular about certain things, uh, fully delegate and fully trust everybody... what I should've done is, you know, up until shortly before I left, I was editing the newsletter every morning, for example, like every morning. I mean that's just kinda silly, you know, to be doing that so many years later after starting."

"Instead, we want to have a whole idea, give it to a team so they see the whole, they really understand it, right? And then they can come up with their tasks and they can figure out how to track that and break it into pieces so they can actually take more responsibility."

"In the shape-up world, you have a single idea that was shaped... Go make your own tasks, because you’re the professionals... The contractors, if you’re building a house, they have to know the plans, but you don’t have to tell them, 'Now take the hammer and go over here.'"

"I see my job as CEO is to try to surf that edge of I'm really in the details... but not overplay my hand with respect to dictating outcomes. The one thing you'll always have as CEO is, no matter how much you tell the team that when I swing by their virtual desk and say, 'I've been thinking about this little detail that's not important right now, but what do you think?' It's like nine out of 10 times, that person is going to go and start working on that thing."

"CEDAF stands for the C is comprehension... E is excitement... D is for de-risk... A is for align... and F is feedback."

"I think they really need to lean into what I call lazy leadership, which is how do I get away from the things I hate as quickly as humanly possible? How do I be Teflon for tasks?"

"I've also found people will shoot themselves in the foot. If I tell them an idea in a board meeting and I say, 'I really need you to try this,' it never works because usually they sandbag it... They want their idea to work. And so I've learned not to do that."

"I would go to my meetings with a stack of Post-Its, and I would write what I wish I was saying on Post-Its and see if someone else would say it first... you've got to police yourself because no one else will do it because no matter how accessible you think you are, other people know that you're the boss."

"In 6 months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person... it helps me and the person operate on a different level where the goal is not, did you hit this OKR? The Meta goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in 6 months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?"

"I need to let these experts own these areas - that's actually the opposite of what you want."