“Do not hand off what you cannot pick up” by habryka

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Delegation is good! Delegation is the foundation of civilization! But in the depths of delegation madness breeds and evil rises.
In my experience, there are three ways in which delegation goes off the rails:
1. You delegate without knowing what good performance on a task looks like
If you do not know how to evaluate performance on a task, you are going to have a really hard time delegating it to someone. Most likely, you will choose someone incompetent for the task at hand.
But even if you manage to avoid that specific error mode, it is most likely that your delegee will notice that you do not have a standard, and so will use this opportunity to be lazy and do bad work, which they know you won't be able to notice.
Or even worse, in an attempt to make sure your delegee puts in proper effort, you set an impossibly high standard, to which the delegee can only respond by quitting, or lying about their performance. This can tank a whole project if you discover it too late.
2. You assigned responsibility for a crucial task to an external party
Frequently some task will [...]
The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.
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First published:
November 12th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rSCxviHtiWrG5pudv/do-not-hand-off-what-you-cannot-pick-up
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.