Delegating strategy without abandoning it

In the video, in Italian, I distinguish delegating from abandoning: whoever delegates hands over a task and stays present; whoever abandons hands it over and disappears. Here I bring the sharpest line I know on the subject, written by the man who ran Intel rather than by a philosopher, and I explain what it means for owners who entrust strategy to someone from outside.

Video transcript (translated from Italian)

There is a subtle difference between delegating and abandoning. Whoever delegates hands over a task but stays present. Whoever abandons hands it over and disappears.

In strategy work this line is decisive. Because strategy is not an assignment you give. It is a process you go through together.

When a company entrusts its strategy to someone from outside and then withdraws, it is not delegating. It is creating a vacuum. And in that vacuum the strategist can analyze, design, propose. But cannot replace the will of the people who live that company from the inside.

Delegation is an act of trust. Abandonment is an act of giving up.

And the difference does not lie in intentions. It lies in presence. In the moments of discussion that are kept alive. In the questions that keep being asked. In the willingness to be challenged.

A company that takes an active part in its own strategic path is not simply collaborating. It is choosing to grow.

And growing means staying. Even when the path takes effort.

The pencil that is not let go

In High Output Management, the book Andrew S. Grove published in 1983, there is a tiny scene worth a treatise. Grove approaches with a pencil in hand, tells the other person to take it, and does not let go. It is delegation that is not delegation: you hand over the task and keep your grip, and the person receiving it no longer knows whether to decide or to wait.

Whoever delegates hands over a task and stays present; whoever abandons hands it over and disappears.

Right after, Grove states the principle that seems to me the most useful ever formulated on delegation: delegation without follow-through is abdication. And he goes on: you can never wash your hands of a task, because even after delegating it you remain responsible for it, and monitoring it is the only practical way to ensure a result. Monitoring, he adds, does not mean meddling.

So the two mistakes of the video sit side by side on the same page. The pencil held back is delegation that does not let go. Delegation without follow-through is the kind that lets go of everything, responsibility included.

Grove: whoever delegates remains responsible

Grove knew what he was talking about. Born in Budapest as András Gróf, he arrived in the United States in 1956–57, was Intel’s first hire in 1968, became its president in 1979 and its CEO in 1987. His book is a manual written by someone who delegated enormous decisions every day, and it shows.

Responsibility for a delegated task stays with whoever delegated it: that is why delegating without monitoring amounts to giving up.

The comparison he uses to explain how to monitor is quality control in a factory. You do not check every piece: that would be like testing one hundred percent of production, and would defeat the purpose of delegating. You check by sampling, and as early as possible, at the stage when correcting costs little, for example on drafts rather than on finished work. And the frequency of checks varies from person to person.

How close to stay depends on who receives the task

Grove also gives a criterion for deciding how closely to monitor. He calls it task-relevant maturity: a combination of motivation, willingness to take responsibility, education and experience, which applies to that task and not in general. With someone who has little of it, the work needs to be highly structured, saying what to do, when and how. With someone who has a lot, it is enough to set goals and check.

His example is a sales manager moved to run a production unit: an expert in one field, a beginner in the other. The same person calls for two different ways of being monitored, and treating them the same way in both would be a mistake.

What a strategist cannot do

Applied to strategy, Grove’s criterion says something uncomfortable for those who delegate. On a company’s strategy no one has more maturity than the owners: they know the business, bear its risk and decide its future. Delegating it entirely to an outsider means entrusting it to someone who, on that precise task, knows less than the person entrusting it.

Peter Block, in Flawless Consulting (1981), defines a consultant as a person who has some influence over an individual, a group or an organization, but no direct power to make changes or implement programs. He also describes the roles a consultant can take. In the expert role, the client says, more or less: you are the expert, find out what is wrong and fix it. In strategy it is the role absent owners ask for, and in my view it works worst, because it leaves the analysis to the strategist and nothing but waiting to the owners. Block prefers the collaborative role, in which consultant and client share responsibility for success and failure.

A strategist has influence but not the power to decide in place of the owners: without their presence, a strategist can analyze and propose, not choose.

Being there without hovering

The opposite risk exists, and Grove names it with his pencil. Owners who entrust the strategy and then redo it at every meeting delegate nothing: they take away the strategist’s ability to work and their own ability to see the work finished. The presence that is needed resembles Grove’s quality control: regular meetings, decisions made at the moments when correcting costs little, questions that keep being asked even when things are going well. It is what I ask of the owners when someone asks me whether they can hand me the strategy and get a finished plan.

In Italian family companies, where much of my work on organization and culture concerns roles and delegation, the two mistakes have familiar faces. There is the founder who hands the management to a son, a daughter or an outside manager and keeps signing every order: the pencil not let go. And there is the one who, tired, hands everything over and withdraws, only to come back when things go badly and find decisions he does not recognize. The first does not delegate, the second abandons, and in both cases whoever receives the task does not know where their responsibility ends.

Delegating strategy, in this sense, is work, not relief. It is for a company moving from decisions concentrated in the founder to roles and delegation too, as I describe in Bringing professional management into the company: in both cases whoever delegates learns a new trade, that of following without doing.

What to do and what not to do

• Entrust the strategy to someone from outside and stay in the decisions that steer it.
• Set regular checkpoints, more frequent at the start.
• Follow the drafts, not just the finished work: that is where correcting costs little.
• Do not disappear after signing the engagement.
• Do not redo delegated work at every meeting: monitoring is not meddling.

Sources

• Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management, Random House, 1983, pp. 59–61 and chap. 12. https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.213936
• Intel, “Andrew S. Grove 1936–2016,” press release, March 21, 2016. https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/284/andrew-s-grove-1936-2016
• Peter Block, Flawless Consulting, Learning Concepts, 1981.