The best person to do the job is not the best person to do the job

Many managers been successful by getting their teams to efficiently do excellent work. Work comes in and you assign the best available person to the job. You swap projects around to ensure that you're maximizing the utilization of the expertise on your team. Your customers (internal or external) are happy. The team is happy because they are succeeding. The manager is rewarded, perhaps with a promotion.

But always assigning the best person to the job is a recipe for failure in the long run. You need to purposefully assign a less-qualified person to do certain jobs. Why? In short, you need to invest in the long-term capability of the entire team, not just the individuals. You need to spread expertise throughout your team. That means assigning projects to people who might not have all the skills or experience they need to do it successfully. Here are a few reasons why:

Single points of failure are bad. It's not good when you have only one person who can do a certain job. What happens if they win the lotto and retire to Hawaii? Or want to take a long vacation? Or maternity/paternity leave?

People want to learn. They are interested in learning new skills and processes. You might find that a fresh set of eyes will bring new ideas about how to make things better. Yes, you can send people to training classes to help them learn. But you also need to give them assignments that stretch their capabilities.

People want to teach. When you assign a project to someone who needs to learn, you should put your experts into the role of teachers and coaches. Most people love this responsibility. Some really thrive in this role...giving you insight into your next potential managers.

Yes, I know this just seems like common sense and should apply to leaders at all levels. So why does this become an issue? Because doing this makes teams less efficient. You've purposely put a less effective person in charge. They will be slower and may do lower-quality work. Your experts will need to spend time coaching and mentoring them and, perhaps, fix their mistakes. It's a double-hit to short-term productivity. That's a difficult decision for a new leader to make.

But, as a next-level leader, your success will be judged over a longer period of time than it was when you were a front-line manager. A manager can succeed and get promoted in a relatively short period of time. A leader (hopefully!) needs to succeed over the long run. So, as my previous post suggested, it is time to stop doing the things that made you successful.

Of course not every situation is a learning opportunity...you shouldn't put a novice in charge on that big project with a critical client! When thinking about this I find a concept from psychology very helpful: The Zone of Proximal Development. Originally articulated by Lev Vygotsky in the context of child development, the ZPD is the difference between what someone can do without help and what he or she can do with help. So you need to look for situations that will stretch someone slightly while giving them proper support or "scaffolding" in Vygotsky's language.

So get out there and assign the wrong person to do the job...give them the right support and you'll find that, sooner or later, you'll have twice as many people who can do it!