As a middle leader, it can be tempting to shoulder the burden of responsibility for your area yourself and delegate too little to those in your team.
However, sometimes - and usually unwittingly - middle leaders find themselves with the opposite problem: they delegate too much, leaving their colleagues feeling overloaded. So how can you ensure the right balance of responsibility that works for everyone?
The lowdown
Effective delegation isn’t just about assigning tasks but picking the right person for the right job at the right time.
That means working out who has the skill and the interest to succeed in a particular area, but also who has the capacity to add a new task to their workload. Also key is clear communication, along with offering support and answering questions.
But what does that look like in practice? How can you tell if you’re micromanaging? And what does it look like to be taking on too much yourself?
What we know about what works
The first thing to do around delegation? Stop calling it that, says Alison Mitchell, headteacher in residence at the University of Glasgow’s School of Education.
“’Delegation’ [can be seen as] a top-down hierarchical term that’s all about giving tasks to somebody or telling them what to do, whereas we’re actually looking at building capacity,” she explains. “The term we use instead is ‘distributed leadership’.”
This is more than a linguistic distinction, she says. Effective distributed leadership is about developing a culture where the leaders can cede some of their power and control, and where “people have agency in order to make decisions to use their strengths and to develop themselves”.
“It’s effective when there’s trust and it’s not simply about getting other people to do tasks that you don’t have time to do or don’t want to do; when it’s about valuing individuals in the team and collaborating,” she advises.
This means that when you’re working out how to divide up responsibilities in your team, decisions should be arrived at as part of ongoing discussions - including through performance management - about “people’s strengths, behaviours that you’d like to grow and develop, and what contributions they might want to make”.
This process requires careful forward planning, Mitchell explains, rather than just telling people that you need them to do something by next week.
So if you have identified areas where individuals would benefit from leadership responsibility, and that they have time and capacity do it, how do you ensure that you don’t over- or under-delegate?
When a leader is not delegating enough, it’s often to do with “wanting to get it right, not wanting to put a burden on other people and wanting to be accountable,” Mitchell says.
And at the other end of the scale, placing too much responsibility on team members can come from “forgetting what it’s like to be teaching full-time”.
The best way of knowing whether you have fallen into either trap is to ask. A culture of honest feedback is critical to effective distributed leadership. Honest self-reflection - perhaps aided by mentors - is also important.
“There’s a balance between building capacity in others, trusting them, but also not putting pressure on other people who don’t have ultimate responsibility,” says Mitchell.
As well as by using feedback, you can usually judge the effectiveness of your distributed leadership attempts by looking at cultural and outcome indicators.
“When we get it right, there’s a culture of agentic working in the school, where people are trusted and valued and supported,” Mitchell says. “When we see distributed leadership failing, it’s often when people are left to do things and then blamed.
“People need to have it communicated that they can take risks and make mistakes as well because they have that trust and support, and ultimately you will be there if things go wrong.”
The experienced leader view
Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:
There’s a concept in business management called the Peter Principle. It suggests that in any organisation with a hierarchy, people are inevitably promoted until they are in a position where they are incompetent.
Guess what? The researcher after whom the principle is named, Laurence J Peter, started his career as a teacher. His book on the topic opens with the example of classroom teachers being promoted to management positions as the first time he noticed the principle in action.
If I’d been Laurence Peter’s middle leader, he would certainly have had plenty more material to pad out his book. Just as I had been poor as a teacher at directing my teaching assistants, I often found delegation very challenging as a middle leader. All of a sudden, you’re expected to tell colleagues who were your peers a month ago what to do.
It’s a crucial part of the job - in many ways it is the job - and yet it’s the part that you almost certainly haven’t done before, and for which you seldom get any training.
The first thing to do is lean into this reality. You are going to need to delegate tasks and that may well be difficult and uncomfortable for you. Fine. Just try and remember that delegating, really, is about building a strong team. This means ensuring that you’ve given clarity around purpose, a strong strategy, regular communication and robust monitoring.
You are already expert in your area of responsibility. This could be early years, primary music or key stage 3 pastoral matters. Now you need to build expertise on the people in your team.
One lesson that it took me far too long to learn was that other people almost certainly don’t work in the same way that you do. Some respond very well to clear tasks and strict deadlines, others favour more freedom.
Where possible, match your requests to these ways of working. Ask members of your team what they prefer. Know, for example, who you’ll need to catch before a team meeting to pre-brief (or “ask for advice”) on a big request that you have planned.
You’ll also need to keep good records on who is responsible for what and when. There are great project management tools like Trello or ClickUp that can help you assign, track and monitor who is working on what. As well as ensuring transparency and clarity, they can also help you to see who in your team is being overwhelmed and who might have more capacity at different points in the year.
Delegating gives many people a knot in the stomach, which sometimes leads to ambiguity, last-minute demands and frustration. Remember Brené Brown’s mantra that “clear is kind”. Your team will respect you much more if you grasp the nettle early and often when tasks need to be distributed.
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