Delegating was once reserved for managerial positions.
The ability to effectively delegate and outsource tasks was the primary role of a manager, who had, ideally, already spent time "in the trenches" doing the work they now assign to others.
Compiling data and generating reports, creating slideshow presentations, implementing features per client requirements...this delegation process flowed from the project managers and was distributed across the team.
Delegation was a skill that had to be honed and refined. You would move up the chain and take on higher-level work, orchestrating, rather than doing.
AI tools can empower individuals to learn delegation.
Because of their general ease of use, AI tools have proliferated quickly and we're still trying to pin down exactly what role they can effectively play, and how integrated they should be. The major shift that I have observed in the workplace, however, is that their introduction has created an opportunity where now everyone has the ability to leverage them for delegation, no matter the type or scope of task.
The ability to delegate is an empowering skill to practice. It offers a sense of freedom to the individual who might be facing down an exhaustive list of tasks: they don't have to do it all themselves. They can learn how to manage a workload efficiently because there's a way to relieve some of the pressure.
Tasks that were once required to be completed by an individual (e.g. populating a spreadsheet, drafting an email) can now be outsourced to a system which can loosely emulate human interaction. AI tooling has zero interface learning curve. Anybody can type into a chatbox. Just upload your request, requirements, and documents, and get a response. A draft of a report could be generated while you are on your lunch break, or article topics could be researched while you respond to emails.
Using AI tooling for delegation is different from delegating directly to humans, but there are core similarities:
- Analyzing one's own workload and learning how to prioritize effectively
- Breaking up large tasks into smaller, actionable pieces
- Deciding what can be completed oneself versus what can be assigned to "someone else"
In the past, all these tasks would sit on someone's desk until they were able to get to them. If there wasn't enough time in the day, the work didn't get done (and the backlog grew).
AI delegation is a skill that needs to be learned.
While it's an empowering skill, delegating doesn't come naturally to everyone, and we should not conflate the ease of use of the tool with mastery over delegation as a skill. Delegating to AI in particular comes with some extra "gotchas", as well:
I've witnessed individuals not providing enough guidance and context, resulting in half-baked and incorrect results (this isn't all that different with humans, either!)
I've seen people blindly using responses without verification because they are delegating work outside their domain of expertise
I've worked with people who didn't understand the nature of context window limitations and how to break their task up into smaller pieces, eventually being forced to abandon it and start over
So, while the interface for an AI tool does not have a learning curve, these tools have an element of unpredictability & unreliability, and the responsible party needs to heavily scrutinize the outputs. If someone is not careful, it could end up proving to be more time consuming than doing the task manually (and you end up being more of a "micro-manager" than a "delegator").
Now that everyone has a potential delegatee they can assign work to, this is a skill that will need to be learned by everyone who is in a knowledge work role. The ability to offload some of their responsibilities and tasks and mitigate some overhead can teach essential lessons around management and leadership.
Efficiency breeds expectation.
Still, there are legitimate concerns that it won't reduce workload. When personal computers were rolled out into office spaces in the 70s/80s, the role of the secretary, with the narrow discipline of answering phones and taking messages, transformed to include word processing, electronic filing, spreadsheet management, and print queues. This resulted in a higher workload and more skills to learn.
Giving every individual the ability to delegate their work could create a situation where the increased amount of the 'resource' (an individual's productivity) ends up being consumed at an equal rate, negating any efficiency gains or resulting in burnout.
Delegation is likely to evolve the workforce.
The ability for workers to delegate is a skill that is going to have to be continuously refined over the years to come. For the employer, it should not be an excuse to merely shoehorn more work into a workday, but to reduce stress on the individual and to create space to do better work.
For the employee, whether a manager or a team member, individuals need to be mindful about what they are offloading. If someone delegates all of their workload to others (or to AI tools), they will end up in a "placeholder" role, rendering their own position all the more easy to replace (and creating their own potential cognitive atrophy).
These tools also offer tremendous opportunity in shaping how we can not just get more work done, but get better work done, as the ability to delegate can hone critical thinking, build managerial skills, and give every individual a sense of personal power.
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