True delegation means elevating the person, not splitting the role

Executive overview

When someone is over capacity, the instinct is to hire another person to share the load. That instinct leads to a horizontal split — two people doing overlapping work with no clear ownership.

True delegate and elevate means pulling the over-capacity person up, then backfilling the lower-level work below them.

The horizontal split mistake

• Companies see someone drowning and assume they need headcount doing the same work
• Splitting a role horizontally creates two lateral seats with a grey area in the middle
• Both people end up half-doing tasks with no clear hierarchy

How to delegate and elevate correctly

• Map everything that exists in the current seat
• Identify which tasks the over-capacity person should not be doing
• Pull that person up into higher-level work
• Let the new hire take the bottom of the seat — the work being vacated