my understanding of OP’s main point is: if you only delegate stuff that you’re capable of doing — even if you’re unskilled/inexperienced/slow/downright-pareto-worse-than-a-cheaper-potential-delegatee at the task — you’ll likely head off a bunch of different potential problems that often happen when tasks get delegated.
however, it seems that commenters are misinterpreting OP’s core claim of “do not hand off what you cannot pick up” as one or more of:
do not hand off what you are not good at
do not hand off what you are not better at than the person to whom you would hand it off
do not hand off what you will not pick up
etc
my understanding is that OP is not making any of those claims in this piece (though i imagine he might separately believe weaker versions of some of them).
also, it seems to me that this heuristic could scale to larger organizations by treating ‘ability to delegate X broad category of task effectively’ as itself a skill — one which you should not hand off unless you could pick it up. e.g. learn delegation-to-lawyers well enough that you could in principle hire anyone on your legal team at your company before you hire a recruiter for your legal team (one who is presumably still much more skilled/experienced than you at hiring lawyers).
my understanding of OP’s main point is: if you only delegate stuff that you’re capable of doing — even if you’re unskilled/inexperienced/slow/downright-pareto-worse-than-a-cheaper-potential-delegatee at the task — you’ll likely head off a bunch of different potential problems that often happen when tasks get delegated.
however, it seems that commenters are misinterpreting OP’s core claim of “do not hand off what you cannot pick up” as one or more of:
do not hand off what you are not good at
do not hand off what you are not better at than the person to whom you would hand it off
do not hand off what you will not pick up
etc
my understanding is that OP is not making any of those claims in this piece (though i imagine he might separately believe weaker versions of some of them).
also, it seems to me that this heuristic could scale to larger organizations by treating ‘ability to delegate X broad category of task effectively’ as itself a skill — one which you should not hand off unless you could pick it up. e.g. learn delegation-to-lawyers well enough that you could in principle hire anyone on your legal team at your company before you hire a recruiter for your legal team (one who is presumably still much more skilled/experienced than you at hiring lawyers).