Engineers wouldn’t be engineers if they didn’t naturally love to solve problems.
Couple that with an unquenchible thirst for knowledge and you tend to get a class of people who are prone to treat every project like this:
Or this:
I’ll be honest – one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my career was break out of that pattern and learn how to delegate. Here’s the thought process that worked for me:
First Step:
I had a fear of being idle.
I realized that was silly.
There will always be more work to do. If you clear away all the stuff that you aren’t an expert already in and delegate those things to the people who are, you will find that you are positioning yourself as more reliable. You can use any downtime you have to learn new stuff.
Second Step:
I had a fear of being passed by (the new hotness would come along if I didn’t keep up with everything.)
This one naturally fell aside as I started to delegate things, because I realized that the true trust in others was a key portion that younger me was lacking, and if I delegated more things I’d be given more responsibilities.
Third step:
Here is the coolest thing of all – you are back to problem solving, but now it is anticipatory.
You spend all your time thinking about problems that don’t actually exist and then creating ways to make sure they never do, by employing teams, writing policies, whatever.
It all starts with step 1 though – so find that UX/UI guy (whether in your own company, on a freelancer site, in a local meetup, or somewhere,) and get on the path.
Originally Posted: https://www.quora.com/I-am-a-CS-engineer-I-have-a-hard-time-delegating-when-building-a-product-How-do-I-overcome-that
Originally Posted On: 2015-05-09