A project manager is given a job to run. Six weeks later she is behind, and the owner has concluded she is not ready for work at this scale.
What happened in those six weeks is that every change order above five hundred dollars went to the owner for approval, subcontractor substitutions required a conversation he was rarely free for, and the schedule she was accountable for was governed by decisions that were not hers. She was assigned a job. Nothing was delegated.
The distinction
Assignment transfers work. Delegation transfers work together with the authority required to complete it.
The second half is the whole thing, and it is what gets withheld, almost always without any decision to withhold it. The leader hands over the task sincerely and keeps the approvals out of ordinary caution, and the two halves are never examined together.
The result is a person who owns an outcome and does not own the means to produce it. They cannot succeed without your availability, which is not something they can schedule, and they cannot fail cleanly either, because the failure has your fingerprints on every second decision.
Why it is diagnosed as a capability problem
This is the part that makes the error self-perpetuating.
When the assigned work goes badly, the visible facts are that a person was given a job and did not deliver it. The approval queue does not appear in any account of what happened, because approvals feel like the leader helping rather than the leader constraining. So the conclusion drawn is about the person: not ready, needs more seasoning, cannot handle scale.
The leader then delegates less next time, having learned something false. The person, correctly reading that their judgment is not trusted, stops exercising it and starts asking about everything, which confirms the diagnosis. Within a year both parties have evidence for a belief that was manufactured by the original arrangement.
A useful check before concluding somebody cannot handle responsibility: list the decisions the work required and mark which ones were theirs to make. If the marks are thin, you have not yet learned anything about the person.
What has to travel with the work
Decision rights, stated as a boundary. Not a general assurance that they have latitude. A named line: change orders under five thousand are yours, above that we talk. Anything vaguer than a number will be interpreted conservatively, because the cost of overstepping falls entirely on them.
The resources the work consumes. Budget, hours, and access to people whose time they will need. Authority to decide without the ability to spend is a formality.
The context you hold and they do not. Why this project matters, which constraints are genuine and which are habit, what the client actually cares about, what happened the last time something similar was attempted. Leaders under-transfer this constantly, because it is unstructured and feels like background rather than instruction. It is the largest single input into whether their decisions resemble the ones you would make.
The right to be wrong inside the boundary. If every decision within their authority is subject to your review and possible reversal, the boundary is decorative and they will work out its true dimensions within a fortnight.
Visibility to everybody else. Tell the subcontractors, the client, and the office that she decides this. Delegation communicated only to the person delegated to is not delegation, because the rest of the world will keep routing around them to you, and you will keep answering.
What does not travel
Accountability stays with you. Delegation moves authority; it does not move the answer you owe when the client asks why the job is late.
Leaders who have not internalised this tend toward one of two errors. They either refuse to delegate at all, on the grounds that they will be blamed regardless, or they delegate and then treat the outcome as belonging to the delegate, which is the more damaging version. A leader who publicly attributes a failure to the person they empowered has taught the entire organization the real terms of any future grant of authority.
The test
Can they make a decision you would not have made, inside the boundary, and have it stand?
If the honest answer is no, nothing has been delegated regardless of what was said. And the first occasion this is tested is the one that decides it, because everyone involved is watching to see whether the boundary is real. Letting a suboptimal decision stand at that moment purchases something considerably more valuable than the decision cost, which is an organization that believes authority here means what it says.
The entries that follow work through the mechanics: the levels of delegation and how naming them prevents most confusion, how to supervise without reclaiming, how to recognise a problem being handed back up, and why delegating to someone who will do it worse than you is frequently still correct.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD