This answer is generic to managing delegates, not specific to tech, but the number 1 thing is to re-orient your own thinking around the goal of building a susta

This answer is generic to managing delegates, not specific to tech, but the number 1 thing is to re-orient your own thinking around the goal of building a sustainable system, not on perfect outcome of the next project. You have to be able to take a few hits if you can learn from it as a team, iterate, improve, and adopt the mindset that moving a little more slowly now will help you build muscles to move more efficiently later. It's easy to not "get" this, or to set it aside in times of stress, but it's important to keep that focus as much of the time as you can, because it helps you apply your own energy to the parts of the process that need fixing, rather than patching code as it were. The number two thing to realize is that lots of people delegate without measuring the follow-up. If you figure out the measurement strategy first, then work backwards to how you communicate the assignments and goals, that might help. ("We're going to meet every monday and review what you coded last week" is totally different from "Our goal this quarter is to X and your piece of it is to move the needle on Y." Third is you have to be consistent and vigilant about the follow-through on the preceeding point. If you say you're going to meet every week, put a standing meeting on the calendar and make it happen, every week, without fail, so that it becomes routine and expected and a part of the rhythm of the office. (Don't announce a new goals plan, or new tasks, or whatever, then forget all about it, then announce a new way of doing things, etc. ) Even if it's not perfect, the process and repetition are very effective tacit communications that a) you're paying attention in good ways and bad (delegates will get visibility both for their progress and their lack thereof), and b) everyone has a miss now and again, and you get to be patient and tolerant of that (if you want) at the beginning, but it's hard to skate week after week if people don't eventually get sh*t done. Implicit in the above is some means to track all of this that you can rely on.