Everyone Teaches You How to Delegate. No One Teaches What Happens After.

If you’ve learned to delegate well, asking clearly, giving context, setting reasonable deadlines, but your team is still burning out, the problem probably isn’t in how you’re asking for work.

It’s in what you do with that work after you get it.

Most leadership advice stops at “delegate well,” as if the hard part ends when someone agrees to take on a task. That’s exactly where the real damage often starts, in the gap between receiving work and doing something meaningful with it.

When I Was the Developer

Early in my career, I worked as a developer in an organization where leadership wanted us to analyze client problems deeply. We were supposed to understand the business context, build real understanding of why features mattered beyond just the technical requirements.

It seemed smart to me at the time. Better understanding should lead to better software, and I bought into that vision completely. So I did the work: deep dives into client workflows, business case analysis, hours spent trying to grasp the bigger picture of what we were building and why.

Then nothing happened with any of it. Clients just wanted their features built. All that analysis I’d done sat somewhere unused, probably forgotten the moment I submitted it. I remember that specific kind of frustration, when work you’ve invested in just vanishes into the void.

When I Became the Manager

A few years later, I got promoted into middle management and became responsible for how our team worked with clients. I still remembered that vision of engineers who understood business deeply, and it had always made intellectual sense to me even when my own analysis had gone nowhere.

So I started asking my engineers to do the same thing. “Let’s really understand what the client needs, not just execute on features.” I thought I was building a better team culture, creating more thoughtful engineers.

Instead, I watched them burn out doing exactly what had burned me out. Same pattern, same specific frustration. I was just on the other side of the table this time, and it took me longer than it should have to realize I’d become the thing that used to drain me.

What I Came to Understand

Here’s what I eventually learned about this pattern, though it took longer than it should have.

When a single experiment doesn’t pan out, that’s just learning. Everyone understands that. But when you create a pattern of requests that consistently go nowhere, where work gets done, submitted, and then vanishes without being used or acknowledged: you’re charging your team an invisible tax every time.

As a leader, I used to think: “No result came from this work, so no harm done.”

What was actually happening in people’s heads: “I wasted my effort again, and nobody even noticed.”

The hard work itself doesn’t burn people out. I would even say that for some of them - hard work is what motivates them the most. What drains them is work that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, including the person who asked for it. It’s like shoveling coal from one pile to another for no reason. Eventually they stop shoveling, or they start wondering why they’re doing this at all.

The pattern quietly teaches your team something you probably don’t want them to learn: their work doesn’t actually matter here.

What Actually Works

The fix isn’t complicated, though it does require discipline you might not have built yet.

Before you ask someone for work, be clear with yourself about what happens if they deliver it. If you can’t honestly commit to doing something with what they produce, using it, learning from it, making a decision based on it: then you probably shouldn’t ask for it in the first place.

After they deliver, do something with it within a reasonable timeframe. Sometimes that something is implementing what they recommended. Sometimes it’s: “We tried this approach based on your analysis, it didn’t work out for these reasons, here’s what we learned.” Either way, you’re closing the loop and showing them their work mattered enough to warrant a real response.

Let people know what happened with their work, even when the outcome is disappointing or the work didn’t lead anywhere useful. Your job isn’t just delegating well. It’s making sure people’s work actually matters in some measurable way, or being honest enough to tell them when it doesn’t.

What Leadership Books Skip

You can become excellent at the mechanics of delegation and still quietly destroy your team’s trust.

The part leadership books skip is probably the most important: what happens in the weeks and months after someone delivers what you asked for. Whether you use it, learn from it, acknowledge it, or let it disappear into the void.

That’s where teams actually break down, not in the asking but in the silence that follows.