Delegation

What delegation is

Delegation (التفويض الإداري) is the grant of authority to take a decision on a specific matter, while responsibility for that matter stays with the person who granted it. A manager who delegates has not given the matter up. The manager has passed the right to settle it to someone else and remains the person who answers for the outcome to whoever stands above. Delegation in this sense is a management practice between a manager and an employee. The definition does not deal with any other meaning the word has outside management.

The concept matters to the line manager, the human resources officer and the owner of the establishment. A manager who holds on to every decision may become a bottleneck for the team, and a manager who delegates without limits may lose sight of what is going on. Delegation that is kept within limits sits between the two, and it is the subject of this definition.

What passes to the employee and what stays with the manager

Every delegation has two parts that move in different directions, and one can be mistaken for the other if neither is named:

• The right to decide passes. The employee may decide the defined matter without going back to the manager each time.
• The responsibility stays. The manager remains answerable for the result of the decision to whoever the manager reports to, and that answerability does not lapse because the employee was the one who decided.

The second part is what separates delegation from the mere distribution of work. Assigning a task to an employee may involve no decision at all, whereas delegation involves a decision and what follows from it. A manager therefore needs to know exactly what has been delegated, because the manager will be asked about it.

How delegation differs from nearby concepts

Delegation can be confused with other management concepts, and each of them answers a different question:

• Acting assignment is an arrangement in which an existing employee takes on the duties of another position for a known period without being appointed to it. It concerns the duties of a whole position, or of a defined part of one, whereas delegation concerns authority to decide one matter. The two can appear together: an employee is given an acting assignment to a position and is also delegated authority over certain decisions within it. Each remains a separate act.
• Decentralized management moves the right to take certain decisions from the top of the establishment to lower levels under a fixed written rule. It is a structural distribution of decisions across the establishment. Delegation is an act a manager performs toward a particular person, and it may be occasional.
• Employee empowerment is giving an employee authority to take decisions within the scope of the job, together with accepting their results. It is a general climate and arrangement. Delegation is the specific act that may take place inside it.
• RACI matrix is a table that sets out, for each task, who carries it out, who is held to account for it, who is consulted and who is informed. It is a map of responsibilities, whereas delegation is the transfer of a decision. A manager can consult the matrix to see who answers for a task after it has been delegated.

The definition of an acting assignment mentions delegation in a single line, to set it apart from an acting assignment. The present definition develops it, and the two agree on the meaning: authority to decide a specific matter, with responsibility remaining with the person who granted it.

What makes a delegation clear

The definition does not prescribe a procedure. A delegation that lacks a few elements, however, may be understood in more than one way, and we suggest that these elements be set out before the employee begins:

• The matter. Which decision exactly is delegated, and not the whole field of work. An employee may be delegated authority to approve requests of one type and not others.
• The limit. How far the authority extends and the point at which the employee goes back to the manager. The limit may be an amount, a type of case or a number of occasions.
• The information. What the employee needs in order to decide. An employee who is given the authority but kept from what the decision depends on may be asked to guess.
• The monitoring. How the manager learns what happened, whether by a periodic report or by checking a sample of decisions, because the responsibility stays with the manager.
• The period. Whether the delegation is permanent or for a time, and whether it is reviewed on a known date.

These elements are our own suggestion for organising a delegation. They are not a list taken from an accredited reference, and in the sources we reviewed we did not find a reference number of elements.

A hypothetical example: delegating the approval of purchase requests

Consider a manager who receives 40 purchase requests a week from the team, approves all of them personally and spends 15 minutes on each. The weekly time spent on approval is 40 × 15 = 600 minutes, which is 10 hours.

The manager then sets a declared amount limit and delegates to the responsible employee the approval of requests below it. Assume that 30 of the 40 requests fall below the limit and 10 fall above it. The manager keeps the 10 requests above the limit and approves them personally. Because the responsibility remains with the manager, a sample of 20% of the delegated requests, which is 30 × 20% = 6 requests, is also checked. The number of requests that now pass through the manager is 10 + 6 = 16 instead of 40.

The manager’s weekly time after delegation is 16 × 15 = 240 minutes, which is 4 hours. The difference is 600 minus 240, which equals 360 minutes, or 6 hours a week. That is 60% of the earlier time, and it matches the fact that 24 of the 40 requests are no longer approved by the manager personally (24 ÷ 40 = 60%).

The figures in this example are hypothetical and serve to show the structure. The example does not show that delegation raises or lowers the quality of decisions. It shows only that checking a sample keeps the manager in touch with what was delegated, and that the time saved is not the whole of the earlier time, because part of it comes back as checking.

How delegation goes wrong

In practice there are arrangements that are called delegation while being something else:

• Delegating the task without the decision. The employee is asked to carry out the work and then returns to the manager at every step. The work has moved and the decision has not, and the employee may feel that they execute and do not decide.
• Delegating the decision without the information. The authority is granted, but the person who holds it is not given what is needed, so the decision becomes a guess.
• Withdrawing the decision at the first mistake. The team may learn from this that going back to the manager is safer than deciding, and the delegation becomes nominal. This does not mean the mistake should go unaddressed. The remedy may be to adjust the limit or the information before the authority is withdrawn.
• Delegating with no declared limit. The employee does not know when to decide and when to go back, and may hesitate over everything or exceed the authority on some matters.
• Delegating without monitoring. It may be understood that the manager has abandoned the responsibility, which by the definition remains with the manager.

These arrangements come from our reasoning about management practice and are not the results of a measured study. We list them because each one departs from an element of the definition, either the passing of the decision or the remaining of the responsibility.

When delegation suits the employee

Not every decision suits every employee at every time. The amount delegated may differ with the employee’s experience and the clarity of the task, which is what situational leadership deals with when it links the leader’s style to the readiness of the employee. Delegation may also fit with participative leadership, which involves employees in decisions. That link between the two concepts is ours and is not stated in the definition of either.

Delegation may relate to preparing replacements as well. An employee who takes wider decisions may gain experience that serves succession planning, and this is a possibility and not an established result. Delegation is also affected by the number of people who report to the manager, which span of control deals with: a manager with a large number of direct reports may be unable to hold every decision. That, too, is our own link.

Questions a manager can ask

A manager can put these questions to themselves, or the human resources officer can put them to the manager, to show where delegation stands in the team:

• Which decisions reach me that someone else could have taken, and why do they reach me?
• Does the employee know the limit of their authority in writing, or do they guess it?
• How do I learn what was decided in my absence?
• What happened when an employee made a mistake in a decision delegated to them, and how did I respond?
• If I were away for a week, what would stop in the team?

The questions do not produce a score. They show points that may call for delegation or for tighter control. If a week’s absence would stop everything, that may point to decisions concentrated with the manager, though it does not by itself show the reason for the concentration. It could be a custom in the team or the lack of a written limit.

A hypothetical example: the limit of authority

Assume a team of 5 employees, each delegated a decision of one type by their manager, with a limit set for each decision. Assume that each employee takes 8 decisions a week within their scope, and that each employee refers one decision in every 8 to the manager because it falls outside the limit.

The number of decisions taken in the team each week is 5 × 8 = 40. The number referred to the manager is 5 × 1 = 5, which is 5 ÷ 40 = 12.5% of the total. The remainder, 40 minus 5, equals 35 decisions taken where they arose. If the number referred rose to 10 decisions in a week, that would not point to a fault: the matters that week may have been larger than usual, or the limit may be narrow. The rise shows only that the limit deserves a look. The figures are hypothetical, and no reference percentage can be drawn from them.

What the concept does not cover

The definition does not decide what can be delegated in a given establishment, since that depends on the nature of the work and on who carries it out. It offers no measure of the right amount of delegation, and in the sources we reviewed we found no accredited measure for it. The amount may differ from one department to another in the same establishment.

Delegation is not a substitute for performance review or for supervision. The responsibility stays with the manager, who therefore needs to follow what was delegated. Nor is it a way of relieving the manager of what is hard to carry alone. Delegation may be looked at as a transfer of burden, whereas its purpose is to move the decision to the person whose work brings them close to the matter. The forms of misuse we described are a view of ours and not a measured finding.

How an establishment can use the concept

We suggest looking at delegation as a question about where decisions sit, and not as a matter of one manager’s behaviour. The human resources officer can collect the decisions that rise to each manager and see which of them recur and could have been settled where they arose. The answer may point to decisions that suit delegation under a written limit, and it may point to decisions that stay with the manager for reasons that belong to their nature.

This is a practical recommendation of ours and is not part of the definition. Delegation rests on trust and on limits together. It is defined by what passes and what stays, and it is judged by what happens after the transfer.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.