What is delegation?
Delegation is handing someone a task along with the authority to complete it, while you keep accountability for the result. The person doing the work makes the decisions the task requires. The leader stays answerable for the outcome and for picking the right person. Handing over work without the authority to finish it leaves the leader as the bottleneck.
Why it matters to a revenue leader
A sales leader who keeps working the largest deals personally caps the team at the size of one calendar. Jesse Sostrin, writing in HBR, describes the move from doing the work to leading through others as a hard shift for many new leaders. William Oncken Jr. and Donald Wass, in their HBR classic on management time, show how a direct report's problem can end up on the manager's desk. In a PE-backed services company adding branches, a VP Sales who approves every quote becomes the limit on growth, and the managers below get little chance to build their own judgment.
Example
A regional sales director at a mechanical services company still prices every large service agreement herself. Quotes wait days for her review, and her branch managers stop forming their own view on price. She gives each branch manager pricing authority up to a set contract size and reviews a sample of their quotes each month. Quotes go out faster, and she spends the recovered time developing the managers.
"Which decisions am I still making that someone on my team should own?"
Sources
- To Be a Great Leader, You Have to Learn How to Delegate Well (Harvard Business Review) checked 9 Oct 2026
- Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? (Harvard Business Review) checked 9 Oct 2026