He arrived before everyone and left after them. He checked every figure himself. When I asked why, he told me — with some pride — that he could not afford mistakes.
What he had actually built was a department in which nobody else was allowed to learn anything.
The arithmetic he was avoiding
A manager who does the work of four people has capped his department at one person’s capacity. Worse, he has taught four capable adults that their judgement is not wanted, and they will eventually agree with him and stop offering it.
I asked him what would happen if he were ill for a month. He said the work would stop. He said it as though it were a compliment.
The uncomfortable part
Delegation is usually described as a time-management skill. It is not. It is a willingness to be less necessary, and that is a much harder thing to ask of someone whose whole sense of worth is built on being needed.
We started small: one report, one person, one month, with the explicit agreement that the first version would be worse than his. It was. The third was better than his, because she had asked a question about the data that he had stopped asking years earlier.
He is now a director. She has his old job.
