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A Chief of Staff I once worked with got fired over a Squarespace site.

He  was a spreadsheet wonk and a consultant. He could model with the best of them, but he'd never touched a drag-and-drop site builder in his life. The last company he worked at, he had hired out all the web work to a friend.

Most teams don’t actually handle skill gaps.. Undelegated work lands on whoever's closest to the problem or who can get it done, regardless of title or job description. 

Two tools invented by a semiconductor CEO and a nuclear submarine commander fix this. Combined, they turn delegation from a gut feeling into a diagnostic you can teach every manager on your team by EOD tomorrow.

Andy Grove co-founded Intel and wrote High Output Management, a book that's become the operating manual for half of Silicon Valley. 

One of his core insights: how you manage someone should depend on their experience with the specific task, not their age or title.

Simple on paper, but in practice nobody takes the time to do this right. You have to manage at the level of the task instead of the person, and that feels like micromanagement (even when it isn’t).

TRM is task-specific, not person-specific.

Your VP of Engineering who's shipped products at three companies? HIGH TRM on technical architecture. But if she's never managed a budget before, she's LOW TRM on financial planning.

Your best individual contributor just became a first-time manager The skills that got them promoted are not the skills the new role demands.

Most of us keep managing the promoted person at the level they were, not where they are on the new tasks.. And we watch our stars silently drown because nobody readjusted for being back to Day 1.

That Chief of Staff? Managed like a senior operator (which he was) instead of a digital marketing beginner (which he also was on that specific set of tasks).

Grove's line on this is worth tattooing somewhere visible: "There is no 'good' or 'bad' management style. Only effective and ineffective ones."

Every person you develop from Low to High TRM on a task frees your time for higher-value work.That's what Grove meant when he wrote: "Increase your leverage by increasing your subordinates' task-relevant maturity."

Delegation is talent development

In 1999, L. David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, the worst-performing nuclear submarine in the U.S. Navy.

He stopped giving orders on day 1.

Within a year, the Santa Fe went from worst to best in the fleet. It produced 10x more officers who went on to command their own ships than the average submarine. Marquet was manufacturing leaders.

His method was a 7-rung ladder that tracks ownership  through the language his team used.

Marquet's mantra: "Strive for Five."

That’s the transition to ownership.

Level 4: "I'd like to change the vendor." (Waiting for approval)

Level 5: "I intend to change the vendor by Friday." (Acting unless you stop them.)

Marquet calls this the shift from leader-follower to leader-leader. At Level 5, you're not managing someone. You're retaining veto power.

Marquet is smarter than most delegation gurus.

Weapons decisions on the Santa Fe were always at Level 1.. Nuclear launch authorization doesn't get delegated to "I've done…" That would be insane.

The Ladder of Leadership isn't about pushing everything to maximum autonomy. It's about choosing the right level based on the consequences of getting it wrong. A pricing decision for your biggest client? Maybe Level 4. Choosing the office snack vendor? Level 7. Stop wasting decision-making energy on things that don't matter.

Sit in your next team meeting,count how many times someone says "What should I do?" versus "I intend (or plan) to..." You'll know who's operating at Level 1 vs Level 5. Word choice reveals ownership better than a performance review.

On the flip side, every time you answer a question or solve a problem they could’ve handled themselves you train them to be a follower and knock them down half a rung.

These probably sound a bit like the same thing. Combined, they become a delegation framework that can take you anywhere..

TRM tells you where someone is on a specific task. The Ladder tells you what language to use and how much autonomy to give. Match them wrong and you get failure

🔵 TRAINING GROUND (Low TRM + Low Ladder) Level 1-2: "Do this. Here's how. Report back." This is close but responsible management. The person doesn't know what they don't know, and the cost of failure at this stage falls on you.

🟡 FRUSTRATION ZONE (High TRM + Low Ladder) Your office manager who's run 40 events is still asking to walk you through the vendor list for approval. They know what to do, but still acting like a 3. 

🔴 DANGER ZONE (Low TRM + High Ladder) What happened to the Chief of Staff. He was operating at Level 5-6 on the Ladder ("I've been handling strategy deliverables") while sitting at Low TRM on digital marketing. Nobody noticed the mismatch because his confidence on other tasks masked his inexperience on this one. The gap swallowed him.

🟢 SWEET SPOT (High TRM + High Ladder) This is the quadrant you're trying to move everyone into, task by task.  Next Time You Assign A Task

Step 1: Assess TRM: Low, Medium, or High

Step 2: Match your Ladder level to their TRM. Low TRM tasks get Level 1-3 management. Medium TRM gets Level 3-5. High TRM gets Level 5-7. 

Step 3: Stretch them. Once someone is consistently delivering on a task ask them to jump up two rungs on the Ladder. If they've been at "I recommend..." push them to "I intend to..." Don't rush. But always be moving them up.

Step 4: Make it shared language. When TRM and the Ladder become common in your org, the ego drains out of management conversations. A VP can say "I'm at Low TRM on this”" without it feeling like an admission of failure. You can say "You're ready to jump up a rung on this" without it feeling like a trap.

People diagnose themselves. They ask for the management style they actually need instead of the one their title says they should get.

Every team has this gap somewhere. The work that isn't getting done well, the person who seems to be underperforming, the task that keeps landing on the wrong desk. 

Use the Delegation Diagnostic,  the answer is usually a management adjustment, not a personnel change.

Make delegation decisions a science and a system you can track

Shoutout to Jesse, who taught me both these frameworks and how to combine them. And Claude, who made the graphics.

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