Sometimes when I delegate it costs me more time explaining and supervising than it would to do the work myself. Sometimes I get back a perfectly decent solutio

Sometimes when I delegate it costs me more time explaining and supervising than it would to do the work myself. Sometimes I get back a perfectly decent solution, but in 5x the time I would have considered reasonable. Most often I get back something that’s not amazing but looks fine, and works at first but turns out to have had some sloppiness or impedance mismatch down the road. Sometimes I get back not only a solid and thorough solution, but a coworker who went way deeper into the topic than was necessary for the particular task, and is excitedly teaching me new things about it. From certain people I get back an explanation of why what I’m asking will turn out to be a mistake 8 moves from now in the 10-dimensional chess game, and thing I actually needed instead. The third group is technically “good enough.” They pull their weight, and we turn a profit on having them around. But if I can manage it, I’ll always try to get the fourth group for junior positions and the fifth group for senior (between those two it’s the same set of people at different stages of development). Those people are maybe 20% of my division, but they do 80% of the work, for what I expect is closer to 30% of the cost.