What does it mean that decision delegation criteria?

Know which decisions you must make yourself and which can be delegated.

Example: You lead a product team and face forty decisions a week. Some are architectural — which platform to build on, which market to enter first, which partnerships to pursue. Others are operational — which bug to fix next, how to format the weekly report, which vendor to use for office supplies. For years you treated every decision as equally yours, and the result was predictable: chronic bottlenecking, exhausted attention, and a team that stopped thinking for themselves because you would override them anyway. Now you apply delegation criteria explicitly. You maintain a short list of decisions that require your specific judgment — those that are irreversible, that cross departmental boundaries, or that directly implicate your team's strategic direction. Everything else has a designated owner and a clear authority level. The vendor choice? Delegated with budget constraints. The bug prioritization? Delegated to the engineering lead with escalation criteria. The weekly report format? Delegated entirely — you do not even review it. Your decision load dropped by sixty percent. Your team's ownership increased proportionally. And the decisions you kept — the ones that actually required your judgment — got better, because you had the cognitive bandwidth to think about them properly.

Try this: List every decision you made or participated in over the past five working days. Be comprehensive — include the trivial ones. For each decision, answer four questions: (1) Was this irreversible or easily reversible? (2) Did this require knowledge or context that only I possess? (3) What would happen if someone else made this decision and got it slightly wrong? (4) Did making this decision myself develop anyone else's capability? Now sort your decisions into three categories: RETAIN (only you should make this), DELEGATE (someone else should make this with defined constraints), and ELIMINATE (this decision should not require anyone's active attention — automate it or set a default). For each DELEGATE decision, write the name of the person who should own it, the constraints within which they should operate, and the conditions under which they should escalate back to you. Implement one delegation this week.