Delegation is critical to scaling your leadership, but it’s so very easy to get wrong. You can give too much autonomy or micromanage. You can delegate to someone who isn’t ready for the responsibility or who doesn’t have the bandwidth. You may not give them the authority or political capital they need to get the job done.

There are many ways to go wrong, but there’s a minimum structure needed to make it work. I call it GODDAMN delegation:

• Goal
• Owner
• Deadline
• Delegation of authority
• Accountability MechaNism

Goal: ideally a SMART goal describing what success looks like.

Owner: the person responsible for getting it done. You can make this more elaborate with a responsibility assignment matrix, but this is the minimum.

Deadline: when you expect completion.

Delegation of authority: the ability to make decisions, direct staff, and allocate resources without requiring your approval.

Accountability mechanism: this is the most important overlooked one. How is this person going to make sure they’re on track? What are their obligations when it comes to reporting on progress, dealing with problems, and escalating blockers?

This is by no means sufficient for effective delegation in all cases. But I’d be hard-pressed to see any delegation reliably work without these key elements.