Most leaders I know are exhausted. Their task lists never end, their calendars are perpetually full, and somewhere along the way, they've heard that delegation is the answer. So they delegate. And then they spend 20% of their time fixing what was delegated, wondering if it would have been faster to just do it themselves.
Sound familiar?
After years of leading engineering teams, I've come to realize that the problem isn't delegation itself—it's that we reach for delegation when we should be reaching for mentoring. We treat them as the same thing. They're not.
Delegation is task transfer. You have something on your plate, you move it to someone else's plate, and you expect it to be done. The goal is efficiency—clearing your workload.
Mentoring through delegation is people development. You use tasks as vehicles for growth. The goal isn't just completion—it's building capability.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: pure delegation works only when someone already knows how to do the work to your standard. The rest of the time, you're setting them up to fail and setting yourself up for frustration.
I've heard leaders say things like: "They've been on my team for two years. They've watched me do this dozens of times. Why can't they do it properly? Are they not paying attention?"
Here's what that leader is missing: critical thinking is invisible.
When you make a decision, there's an entire process happening in your head—evaluating scenarios, weighing trade-offs, anticipating objections, drawing on past failures. You consider and discard options in seconds. You pattern-match against experiences your team has never had.
None of this is visible to anyone watching you.
Your team sees the output. They don't see the reasoning. And without the reasoning, they can't replicate the quality. They're copying the what without understanding the why.
This is why observation alone doesn't create capability. Exposure is not the same as learning.
Not every task requires deep mentoring investment. Here's a simple framework I use:
| Situation | Approach | Time Investment |
|---|---|---|
| Routine task, the person has done it successfully before | Pure delegation | Low |
| New task for this person, but straightforward | Light mentoring—set expectations, check in midway | Medium |
| Complex task, first time for this person | Full mentoring mode—invest heavily upfront | High |
| Urgent task, no room for learning curve | Do it yourself or pair closely | High (short-term) |
| Stretch assignment for high-potential team member | Full mentoring with deliberate challenge | High |
The mistake most leaders make is treating everything as row one—pure delegation—regardless of the person's readiness.
There's a fundamental difference between how managers and mentors think about delegated work:
A manager asks: "Did they complete the task?"
A mentor asks: "What did they learn from this task? Are they better equipped for the next one?"
When you adopt the trainer mindset, your measure of success changes. A task that required heavy guidance but resulted in genuine skill development isn't a failure—it's an investment. A task completed perfectly but learned nothing is a missed opportunity.
This shift matters because your job as a leader isn't just to get today's work done. It's to build a team that can handle tomorrow's challenges without you.
Over the years, I've observed (and made) several common mistakes:
Different people have different learning styles, different experience levels, and different areas of confidence. The guidance that works for one engineer won't work for another. Treating everyone the same isn't fair—it's lazy.
I once asked a senior engineer to draft an email to a client explaining a two-week delay in our delivery timeline. Since he'd been on the project for months, he knew the technical reasons. So I was confident he could do it. Simple enough, right?
The draft he sent me was technically accurate—and completely wrong. He'd listed every reason for the delay in painful detail: dependency issues, a team member falling sick, an underestimated module. Reading it, I could feel the client's confidence in us evaporating.
What I'd failed to tell him was this: when communicating delays to clients, the goal isn't to explain why we failed—it's to reassure them that we're in control. Lead with the revised plan, acknowledge the delay briefly, and focus on what we're doing to ensure it doesn't happen again.
That calculation happened automatically in my head. I'd written dozens of these emails. But he'd never written one. I delegated a task when I should have mentored him through the thinking behind client communication.
We hand off tasks without explaining the context, the audience, the quality bar, or the reasoning behind our preferences. Then we're surprised when the output doesn't match our expectations
For a presentation: Who's the audience? What do they care about? What's the one thing they should remember?
For an engineering task: What's the use case? What are the edge cases? What does "done" look like?
For client communication: What's the relationship history? What tone works with this client?
If these things are clear in your head but you haven't said them out loud, you haven't actually delegated—you've just transferred your anxiety to someone else.
Many leaders check in only at the deadline. By then, if something's wrong, there's no time to course-correct without taking over entirely. This creates exactly the dynamic we're trying to avoid: the leader swoops in, fixes everything, and the team member learns only that they can't be trusted.
Some leaders unconsciously use delegation to validate their own importance. They hand off work without proper support, and when it comes back imperfect, they feel confirmed in their belief that only they can do it right.
This isn't delegation. It's a setup.
If invisible thinking is the core problem, the solution is to make it visible:
This feels inefficient at the moment. It's not. It's how you scale your judgment across a team.
Don't wait until you're drowning in work to start preparing your team. When things are calm:
When you train ahead of the crisis, you have time to correct mistakes without pressure. You can set an early internal deadline, review together, and iterate—instead of fixing things yourself at midnight.
Before handing off any meaningful task, be clear about:
The last one is crucial. When people understand the reasoning, they can make good judgments in situations you didn't anticipate.
For any task that stretches beyond a day or two, schedule a midpoint check-in. Not to micromanage—to catch misalignments early when they're cheap to fix.
A good check-in question: "Walk me through your approach so far and what you're planning next."
This gives you visibility without taking over, and gives them a chance to surface doubts before they become problems.
Mentoring isn't about downloading your brain into someone else's. It's about activating their own critical thinking.
Instead of telling them the answer, ask questions:
This takes longer than just giving instructions. But it builds people who can think, not just execute.
Here's something easy to forget: people learn best when they feel safe to make mistakes. If every delegation ends with visible disappointment or extensive correction, your team will stop taking risks. They'll ask for permission on everything. They'll optimize for not being wrong instead of being excellent.
I had an engineer who joined our team new – sharp, curious and full of potential. In her first few months she would ask questions constantly. Sometimes they were basic, and sometimes they challenged the team’s assumptions. I was busy, and I agreed that I would sometimes brush off her questions that felt obvious. Over time, I noticed that her questions stopped. I assumed she had figured things out on her own. But then I realised she had gotten slower. Tasks which should take only a day or two for her, are taking more days. She was second-guessing everything, checking and rechecking and afraid to move forward.
When I finally sat down with her, she admitted, “I didn’t want to seem like asking stupid questions. I felt like I should know this stuff by now.” I had unintentionally taught her that questions were a sign of weakness, and in trying to be efficient, I had killed her confidence.
It took months to rebuild her confidence. I started asking her questions instead. I made space for her to think out loud without judgment. Slowly, the curiosity came back.
Mentoring requires that you celebrate progress, not just outcomes. Acknowledge what they did well before discussing what to improve. Frame corrections as investments in their growth, not judgments on their worth.
I won't pretend this is easy. Mentoring takes more time than delegation, at least upfront. There are days when it genuinely would be faster to do it yourself.
But here's what I've learned: every hour you invest in mentoring pays dividends for months. The engineer you coached through a difficult client presentation eventually handles client relationships without you. The junior developer you walked through architectural decisions starts making good judgment calls independently. The team lead you mentored through their first performance review becomes someone who develops others.
You don't just clear your task list. You multiply your capacity.
And perhaps more importantly: you build people who feel trusted, challenged, and growing. People who want to stay. People who will eventually do the same for others.
That's not delegation. That's leadership.
What's your experience with delegation vs mentoring? I'd love to hear what's worked—or not worked—for you.
Delegation is the act of transferring responsibility for completing a task to someone else, with the primary goal of efficiency and workload reduction.
The main objective of mentoring is to develop people, not just complete tasks, by making thinking, decision-making, and context visible so individuals can build judgment, confidence, and long-term capability.
Delegation is the transfer of responsibility for completing a task, primarily to reduce a leader’s workload. Mentoring uses tasks as a tool to develop skills, judgment, and confidence, with the goal of long-term capability building rather than short-term efficiency.
Yes. Even senior team members need mentoring when facing new domains, responsibilities, or stretch roles. Readiness, not seniority, should determine whether a task is delegated or mentored.
Leaders can mentor without micromanaging by guiding how people think, not dictating what they do. This means setting clear expectations upfront, making their reasoning visible, asking thoughtful questions, and checking in early to align in direction, without taking control of execution.
Pure delegation works best when the person already has the skills and judgment to deliver the task to the required standard without guidance. Routine or previously mastered tasks are ideal for delegation.
