What Cannot Be Delegated

I have been involved in a good number of restructures of international companies in this market over the past fifteen years or so, and one thing has been consistent enough that I now treat it as a rule. When the chief executive leads it, it works. When it gets delegated down, it fails.

That is not a comment on the people it gets delegated to. Some of the best restructuring work I have seen was done by human resources directors and country finance leads who understood the mechanics far better than the chief executive did. The mechanics were never the problem.

I use restructuring here because it is the clearest case, not because it is a special one. The same pattern shows up whenever an organisation is under real pressure, and the pattern is worth more than the example.

You can delegate the how. You cannot delegate the why

Almost everything in a difficult moment can be handed to somebody else. The sequencing, the legal review, the modelling, the timetable, the drafting of the communication, the logistics of who is told in what order. All of that is craft, and specialists do it better than generalists.

One thing cannot be handed over, and it is the only thing the organisation is actually waiting for. Why is this happening.

People are rarely confused about process. They are not at their desks wondering about the timetable. They want to know why the business has arrived here, whether the reasoning is sound, and whether the person who decided is willing to stand in front of them and say it. When that person is absent, the absence becomes the message, and it is a worse message than anything they were afraid of hearing.

So the test is simple, and it is not only a restructuring test. If the person who made the decision can explain the reason and chooses not to deliver it personally, the thing has already started badly, whatever the plan looks like.

Leaders delegate the part that costs them something

It is worth being honest about what is happening when a leader steps back from this.

It is rarely laziness and it is rarely a lack of care. Usually it is avoidance, and understandably so. Nobody wants to be in the room when a colleague of nine years understands what is being said to them. Delegation offers a respectable way not to be there. The work still gets done, the leader remains available for the parts that are strategic, and nobody has to name what has actually been avoided.

Once you start looking for it, the pattern is everywhere.

When a strategy has failed publicly, the post-mortem gets delegated and the acknowledgement never gets made. When results miss badly enough to frighten people, the finance team is asked to explain the numbers and nobody explains the situation. When someone senior has behaved in a way the organisation cannot defend, the process goes to legal and human resources, which is correct, and then the silence from leadership around it does more damage than the incident did. When a succession is announced, the mechanics are handled immaculately and nobody says out loud what it means for the people who were not chosen.

In each case the delegable part is the work. The part that cannot be delegated is standing in front of people, and that is precisely the part that gets handed on.

Silence is not neutral

The moment a difficult thing is suspected, the rumours begin. That is not a sign of a leaky organisation. It is what organisations do.

What matters is that the rumour moves faster than the official message, every time. By the time a carefully drafted communication has been through review, three versions of the story are already circulating, and the official version now has to compete with them rather than establish anything.

Leaders often respond by saying less, on the theory that information leaks and silence is safer. In practice silence is a vacuum, and it gets filled by whoever is most confident and least informed. If you are not setting the narrative, somebody with a partial view and an active imagination is setting it for you, and they are usually more available than you are.

Getting ahead of it does not mean announcing things before they are decided. It means being clear about what is happening, what is not yet decided, and when people will hear more, and then meeting that date even when there is nothing new to say. The discipline is in the rhythm rather than the content. A leader who appears on the day promised, with nothing to add, has still told the organisation something important about whether it can rely on them.

The limits of empowerment

There is a belief among leaders, and it is a well-intentioned one, that the right posture is hands off. Give people room. Let them find their own way. Do not hover.

I think you can do too much empowerment, and pressure is where that shows up fastest.

Handling contraction is a relatively new area for many organisations in this market. Five or six years ago the market was moving so quickly that you could get up in the morning, do exactly what you did the day before, innovate nothing, and still record twenty or thirty per cent growth. That produced a generation of genuinely capable managers who have never run anything difficult. The muscle is not there yet.

So when a leader delegates something hard into a team that has never done it, and then stands back in the name of empowerment, the result is predictable. They make a mess of it, and it is not their fault.

Where the experience does not exist, the leader has to get in and get their hands dirty. Not to take over, but to guide and to mentor through it. I know from running my own business that if I do not get into something directly, it either does not happen or it does not happen the way it needs to. That is not a failure of trust. It is a reading of where the experience actually sits.

The case study, in detail

This is where restructuring earns its place as the example, because it is the situation in which the undelegable part is hardest and most specific.

There is a craft to telling people, and most of it is about protecting dignity rather than protecting the company. Deliver the message late on a Friday afternoon, so nobody is required to walk back through a floor of colleagues immediately afterwards. Where circumstances allow, place people on garden leave rather than having them return to a desk they no longer have a reason to sit at. Be transparent internally about what has happened and why. And give people a chance for closure, which is the one most often skipped and the only one that is about the person rather than the logistics.

These are small things and they cost almost nothing, which is what makes their absence so revealing.

None of it changes the decision. It changes whether the organisation comes out of the decision intact.

Underneath the specifics sits a principle that has nothing to do with redundancy. Dignity is a commercial decision rather than a moral luxury. The people who remain are forming a view about what this organisation does to people when it is under pressure, and they will price that into how much of themselves they commit to it afterwards.

What pressure reveals about a leadership team

One more thing that gets missed. A hard moment is not only a communication exercise aimed at the wider organisation. It is the most revealing thing a leadership team ever does together.

The people around that table learn, in a compressed few weeks, who argues for their own function at everyone else's expense, who quietly protects their own people, who says one thing in the room and another outside it, and who is prepared to carry a decision they argued against. That is true of a restructure, and it is equally true of a bad quarter, a failed launch or a succession that disappoints two of the people sitting there.

None of it is forgotten afterwards. Teams that handle one of these badly are still carrying it two years later, usually without ever having discussed it.

What is left

Strip out everything that can properly be given to somebody else and what remains is not an unfortunate residue of the job. It is the job.

The parts of leadership that cannot be delegated are, almost by definition, the hard parts. Saying the thing that will not be welcome. Standing behind a decision people disagree with. Being visible when it would be more comfortable to be busy elsewhere. Accepting that you are the one who has to explain it. A leader who systematically hands those on has delegated the role itself and kept the title.

There is a small consolation in this, and I offer it because leaders in these situations tend to be harder on themselves than they need to be.

The reason has a short life. Within a year or two the strategic logic has been absorbed, the market has moved again, and hardly anybody can reconstruct the argument that made it necessary. What stays is much simpler. People remember who told them. They remember whether the person who made the decision was in the room or somewhere else that week. They remember whether they were treated as a cost line or as somebody who had given the place several years of their life.

You owe people the reason, and you should deliver it yourself. But the reason is not what they will keep. They will forget why it happened long before they forget whether you were there.