The Manager’s Capacity Ceiling
Using Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions to delegate smarter, grow A-Players, and turn mistakes into long-term capability
“Your work as a manager will never be done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done.”
Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, shared this management wisdom in his book, High Output Management.
Like a gas when introduced into a vacuum, its molecules spread out to fill the entire available volume. Every person’s to-do list will continually expand due to constant noise, distractions, and other people’s priorities.
As a team lead, it is your responsibility to help your subordinates focus on the most pressing matters - the things they can control and influence - by delegating to and empowering those around you.
Developing these crucial managerial capabilities will also reduce the risk of you hitting your own capacity ceiling, ensuring that you are not the one holding the team back.
🥇 - Delegating and empowering
Your goal is to place the people best positioned to make decisions and take action promptly to maximise the team output.
Insufficient or ineffective delegation is a common obstacle that prevents people and their managers from reaching their full potential.
I have found that many people, including experienced executives I coach, often refuse to delegate tasks to others because they feel it takes too much time and effort. But effectively delegating to others is perhaps the single most powerful high-leverage activity available to people managers. So why don’t people delegate? It’s because they believe that:
They can do it better themselves,
They can do it faster themselves, and
The other people are already too busy.
While the three beliefs are likely all true in isolation, they are also fallacies.
Remember that there is always more work to be done.
I have never experienced a sustained period during my twenty-year managerial career, and now, working as an independent executive coach for a decade, this wasn’t true.
Therefore, managers who fail to learn to delegate will inevitably hit a ceiling and become a constricting factor for their team. Overriding all others and thereby capping the team’s output, preventing it from achieving high performance.
There are two additional reasons why even experienced managers often fail to delegate when they should. They are:
Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), and
Self-preservation because of Fear of Losing Control (FOLC).
FOMO and FOLC arise from chronic structural tension within performance cultures. A tension created by an expectation of having to be strategic while being urgently tactical, and to empower others while simultaneously being available at short notice with all the details.
It is these two reasons in particular that I don’t recommend delegating your team’s Type 1 decisions (irreversible, high-risk) to subordinates. That would be unwise and an inappropriate distribution of your leadership responsibility.
Your goal should be to delegate as many Type 2 decisions (reversible, low-risk) as possible, thereby increasing your team’s capacity and, consequently, its output.
Keeping the Type 1 decisions is rational. Not delegating Type 2 decisions is irrational and reduces the team’s output because you take on too much yourself, and you are also taking away powerful learning experiences from your A-Players and those aspiring to become A-Players.
Delegation is not just about efficiency - it is about development.
Development inevitably involves mistakes. If you delegate Type 2 decisions, people will occasionally misjudge, move too slowly, communicate poorly, or choose an imperfect path and fail.
That is not evidence that delegation was a mistake; it is evidence that learning is occurring.
Your reaction in those moments can matter more than the mistake itself. If you publicly override, rescue too quickly, or subtly punish initiative, your team will see this and respond negatively.
If instead you review what happened, separate the person from the problem, and ask, “What did we learn?”, you convert short-term imperfection into long-term capability. In front-office environments, zero mistakes is a fantasy.
The goal is intelligent risk-taking with bounded downside.
📫 - A quote that I am currently pondering
“Expertise is a commodity; the ability to navigate the environment is the differentiator.”
John Perry Barlow (American poet and essayist)