Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate?

Re:Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learnin... by tbragin on Saturday October 14, 2023 @12:14PM (#37881676)

What I've seen as effective as a new manager is to think about scoping whole and independent areas of responsibility for each individual on my team. This requires upfront thinking and planning, but pays in the long term as individuals come into these areas as end-to-end owners. In many cases, overtime, they became deeper experts than me in their respective areas, such that 1 + 1 > 2 in the long run.

As far as specific task delegation, if you are looking at your task list, I'd recommend a modification of "Eisenhower Matrix", that looks like this:

- Important / One-time Tasks - Keep for yourself.

- Important / Frequently Repeating Tasks - Delegate with high priority.

- Not important / Frequent tasks - Delegate with low priority.

- Not important / One time tasks - Delete.

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Re:Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learnin... by ryan-duve on Saturday October 14, 2023 @03:13PM (#37883328)

The four-quadrant matrix I am familiar with is:

                      Urgent  Not-Urgent
    Important             Q1          Q2
    Not-Important         Q3          Q4

- Q1: Do it now

- Q2: Do it the next time you can

- Q3: Do it now or don't do it at all

- Q4: Don't do it at all

Compare this to the modified matrix:

                    One-Time   Repeating
    Important            MQ1         MQ2
    Not-Important        MQ3         MQ4

If I understood your post, the translation is:

- MQ1: Do it yourself

- MQ2: Delegate

- MQ3: Don't do it at all

- MQ4: Delegate but maybe not done at all

It is interesting that Q1->MQ1 and Q2->MQ2 quite straightforwardly, but (Q3, Q4) -> (MQ4, MQ3) seem to be swapped.

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Re:Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learnin... by PeterisP on Saturday October 14, 2023 @05:00PM (#37884234)

I'd rather argue that MQ2 should be implemented as a standard process that is explicitly listed as a job duty of some position with appropriate documentation and possibly training, and MQ1/MQ3 are those tasks which can be simply delegated for someone to do once.

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