Everyone’s a Manager Now: Delegating, for Humans and AI

Everyone needs to learn to delegate effectively in the age of AI, even if you don’t manage any humans. AI agents will research the paper, write the draft, crunch the spreadsheet, just about anything you need, short of grabbing your coffee. So why does it still go sideways so often? In this episode, Alex and Moah reveal the ways delegating tasks to a machine are the same as delegating to a person — and the science that explains why most of us are bad at both. Research shows the CEOs who delegate well make 33% More revenue — yet 75% of top CEOs admit they're bad at this one skill.

Along the way, Alex and Moah dig into why we struggle to let go, like the psychology that makes your own work feel superior and the cognitive bias that mistakes long hours for good results. To help you level up your ability to delegate, they walk through the five levels of managerial delegation, the 1974 Harvard Business Review classic that asks "who's got the monkey?", and the military’s concept of "Commander's Intent". You'll leave with one concrete assignment: find the single task on next week's plate that only you can do, and hand off something else to a person or a machine. The hard part was never the handoff. It's the trust.

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Links from the show!

Gallup: Companies with CEOs who delegate better https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182414/delegating-huge-management-challenge-entrepreneurs.aspx

9 Tips to Delegate Effectively https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/how-to-delegate-effectively

Commander’s Intent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intent_(military)

Who’s Got the Monkey? https://internalmedicinefaculty.wustl.edu/app/uploads/2018/05/Whos-Got-the-Monkey-HBR.pdf

Got to-dos? Get GQueues! gqueues.com

Boomerang for Gmail boomeranggmail.com

Boomerang for Outlook boomerangoutlook.com

*Correction: We misstated a statistic in the audio. Delegator CEOs had a 3-year growth rate that was 112 percentage points higher (1,751% growth vs. ~1,639% for low delegators.)