Given a choice, should you delegate activities that are familiar to you or those that aren’t? Before answering, consider the following principle: delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations. Because it is easier to monitor something with which you are familiar, if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best. But recall the pencil experiment and understand before the fact that this will very likely go against your emotional grain.
Nice principle.
Reminds me of the following quote from classic management book High Output Management:
Oh nice! I love that book, but had forgotten it also took a stance on this. Thank you for digging up the quote.
Maybe I will make a (somewhat lazy) LessWrong post with my favorite quotes
Edit: I did it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAH4dYhbw3CkpoHz5/favorite-quotes-from-high-output-management