Quotes About Delegation

The inability to delegate is one of the biggest problems I see with managers at all levels

Delegating your accountabilities is abdication

If you want to save time, invest in a team.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: "What can my boss do really well?" "What has he done really well?" "What does he need to know to use his strength?" "What does he need to get from me to perform?" He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

No member will make a decision with regard to a matter for which he does not have primary responsibility. Should such a matter be brought to him, he will refer it to the colleague whose primary responsibility it is. Indeed it is a wise precaution for members of the top-management team not even to have an opinion on matters that are not within their own areas of primary responsibility.

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property.

What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the "conductor.

Prioritization is rightly the job of the business sector, not the technology organization, and so should not be within a technical manager's remit. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for business management to abdicate that responsibility and leave a technical manager to prioritize the work—and

Josephus writes of a delegation of 8,000 Roman Jews—out of a likely total Jewish population of 40,000—who received an audience with the Emperor Augustus in 4 ce.

I'm not real good at the administrative part of running a company.

Subordinates soon learn not to ask the Arsonist for help in solving the problems that he assigned them. If they do, instead of trying to identify the barriers to a solution, he changes the assignment altogether, and in the process he overloads his subordinates with new problems.

ON BUSY BASTARDS: A busy bastard can't stop finding things to do. He never rests and as a result, his staff never rests. He's always making work that expands to fill whatever time is available. The point I make in my book is: Be busy, work hard, but don't become so busy that you cut out other things in life, like family and recreation and hobbies. And never be so busy that you're not giving your staff and your followers enough time to do the same thing.

If you delegate tasks, you create followers, if you delegate authority , you create leaders

When you delegate tasks, you create followers. When you delegate authority, you create leaders

The art of leadership is not to spend your time measuring, evaluating. It's all about selecting the person. And if you believe you selected the right person, then you give that person the freedom, the authority, the delegation to innovate and to lead with some very simple measure.

Management isn't doing—it's seeing that it gets done. Following

I call it strategic incompetence." Shay's lips curved. "The art of avoiding certain tasks by pretending you don't know how to do them.

Managing is getting paid for home runs someone else hits.

What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy. [Addressing to a delegation of Italian socialists in Moscow after Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922]

If he gave an assignment, he didn't really care how it was done or who did it or what problems they had. It just had to get done, and that was that.

If you lack experience or a particular talent or skill and you don't want to pay the price to acquire it, then hire someone who has it to do the job for you.

Where there are low consequences and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate.

The way you delegate is that first you have to hire people that you really have confidence in. You won't truly let those people feel a sense of autonomy if you don't have confidence in them.

God rested, we take over!