Employee engagement in the U.S. is at its lowest point in a decade. LinkedIn reports that more than 60% of workers feel underutilized in their jobs. Harvard Business Review finds that more than half of managers are burned out. This trifecta of disengagement, underutilization, and burnout is costing businesses billions each year in lost productivity, turnover, and stalled growth.
But here’s the unpopular truth: much of this crisis stems from one of the most widely accepted ideas in leadership—delegation.
For decades, the mantra has been simple: delegate more. The logic seems sound. Free leaders from busy work, push responsibility downward, and create efficiency. Yet, the evidence tells us it hasn’t worked. Leaders are drowning, employees are stuck in roles that don’t stretch them, and companies can’t seem to scale beyond a certain point.
The problem isn’t delegation itself. It’s how we’ve been doing it.
Delegation as Task-Dumping
Most leaders see delegation as task transfer: taking something off their plate and giving it to someone else. In practice, this usually means two things dumping unwanted work on employees, or offloading responsibility without guidance and support. Employees recognize the difference. They know when they’re being developed and when they’re being dumped on.
Delegation, when done wrong, is a trust killer. It leaves employees disengaged, leaders resentful, and organizations stagnant.
Delegation as Growth Strategy
True delegation is not about efficiency. it’s about growth. The most effective leaders don’t just assign tasks; they create assignments that stretch people, build capacity, and accelerate careers. Delegation, when reframed as a growth strategy, becomes the single most powerful leadership tool we have.
And growth isn’t just nice to have, it’s survival.
According to Boston Consulting Group, the half-life of skills is now just 2.5 to 5 years and the work life for new graduates will last between 50 -60 years. That means the skills your employees rely on today will be outdated in just a few years. Over the course of their working lives, employees will need to reinvent themselves 24 to 26 times. Without continuous growth, they and by extension, their companies risk irrelevance.
Organizations face the same pressure. A generation ago, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 was more than 60 years. Today, it’s closer to 18. The collapse of Blockbuster in the face of Netflix, Kodak’s failure to pivot to digital photography, and countless retail giants that underestimated e-commerce all illustrate the same lesson: when companies stop evolving, they vanish. And in today’s AI-driven world, that cycle is accelerating.
The Wake-Up Call for Leaders
This is why growth must be at the center of how we lead. When leaders use delegation merely to lighten their own load, they waste opportunities to help employees reskill, adapt, and stay relevant. But when delegation is tied to growth, every assignment becomes a chance to future-proof both the individual and the organization.
Think about it: every time a leader assigns work, they have a choice. They can simply pass the task along, or they can align that assignment with an employee’s aspirations, skill development, or career goals. One approach gets the job done today. The other builds the organization for tomorrow.
The Path Forward
The workplace of today and tomorrow demands something different. With AI reshaping roles, hybrid work altering team dynamics, and younger generations demanding growth opportunities, leaders cannot afford to keep using outdated models of delegation. If leaders want to scale their organizations, they must first learn how to scale their people.
That’s why I wrote Never Delegate Again. At its heart is a framework I call The Growth Matrix, designed to help leaders distinguish between task-dumping and growth delegation. The model guides leaders in aligning assignments with both organizational needs and employee development. Done right, delegation fuels not only productivity but also engagement, retention, and long-term growth.
The stakes could not be higher. If we don’t change the way we lead, managers will continue to burn out, employees will continue to disengage, and businesses will continue to plateau.
We don’t have a leadership shortage in this country. We have a growth shortage. And until we fix it, we risk losing an entire generation of leaders—and the future relevance of our organizations along with them.
Brad Federman
PerformancePoint, LLC
+1 901-291-1545
