From Bathrooms to Boardrooms: Delegation Comes with Inefficiency
I live alone in a house with three bathrooms, and I’ve asked my maid to clean one every day. The result? A bathroom often gets cleaned when it’s clean to begin with. This is inefficient: too many cleaning chemicals get used, wasting my money and harming the environment.
If I were doing the cleaning myself, I’d first check whether any cleaning is needed at all. That’s because the time it takes to evaluate is a fraction of the time to clean. But with my maid, I don’t bother, because I don’t bear the effort. I’m less motivated to optimise her time than mine. After all, I’m paying her for it.
Besides, delegation demands clear instructions like “Clean one bathroom every daily”. If I were to tell her to “Clean if it needs cleaning”, her standards for cleanliness may be lower than mine. Or she might be tempted to skip a slightly dirty bathroom. She’s incented to do so, because it saves her effort, while I’m the one who has to deal with the bathroom. To avoid these problems, I have to give her the unambiguous instruction of “Clean one bathroom daily.”
We’ve all faced inefficiency in our workplace and heard from friends, too. Have you wondered why this happens? One fundamental cause is delegation: it will always be more efficient for a competent engineering manager to perform a task personally than to delegate it to a software engineer1. And each layer of management compounds the inefficiency: if you’re 8 levels removed from the CEO, don’t be surprised if your company’s products are mediocre — or if too much of your time goes into corporate overhead. It’s like building a car where the petrol engine drives a gearbox, which powers a generator, which runs an electric motor, which boils water, which drives a steam turbine, which turns another generator, which runs an electric motor. Each layer loses somes a significant amount of energy, so by the end, you’re lucky if this car moves at all.
… were it not for the competing priorities of the manager.