Another important factor that took me a while to learn and be comfortable with: successful delegation is not the same as defect free delegation. People will ma

Another important factor that took me a while to learn and be comfortable with: successful delegation is not the same as defect free delegation. People will make mistakes. They will do so even if they are competent and you were well justified in delegating a task to them. Nevertheless, screwups are going to happen, and sometimes it'll be something that is beyond the capabilities of the person you delegated the task to deal with. But it's a mistake to think of these things as failures of delegation, or to use them as an excuse to curtail responsibilities. Delegating properly requires a holistic view. One of the fundamental problems of people who micro-manage or are incapable of delegating is that there will always be fuckups, thus there will always be excuses to do it yourself instead of delegating. But this is because we're comparatively blind to our own fuckups, which we see as recoverable and due to things beyond our control whereas the temptation is to see other people's fuckups as due solely to incompetence. If nothing ever seems to be going wrong that may actually be a sign that you're not delegating enough. The trick is finding the right balance.