While there clearly are a variety of personal factors at work (“I prefer to do it myself” or “I have more confidence it will be done correctly if I do it”), I have learned that a bigger explanation is provided by the measurement and reward systems of most firms (hence the name systemic under-delegation).

First, an excessive pressure on personal billability (or chargeability) at senior levels can lead to inefficiencies in staffing. If a partner feels that he or she is primarily held accountable for personal billable hours (rather than, say, the profitability of the engagements that partner is responsible for), then he or she is likely to hoard work rather than be active in looking for operating efficiencies.

This will be particularly true, and is particularly dysfunctional, the firm is having a weak year. In a weak year the firm would be better served if the partners pushed more work down and spent the time in the marketplace generating new work, instead of attempting to protect their position by staying busy on work that the underutilized juniors could do and avoiding marketing efforts. Yet in various countries experiencing a recession, this is the exact behavior I have observed.)

A second cause derived from the firm’s management systems is that in few firms are engagement leaders held responsible for seeking out ways to reduce the costs of delivering the engagement. Amazingly, some firms do not track the profitability of their work engagement by engagement. Even among those who do, the primary measure of engagement-level profitability that most firms use is the realization rate, that is, the percentages of the standard rates of the personnel used on the engagement that are collected from the client. As critical as this factor is, my research shows that it does not provide an adequate incentive to look for opportunities to increase leverage (i.e. delegation) on the engagement. When there is no particular incentive for a partner to find ways to increase the leverage on his or her client project, under-delegation is sure to result. Partners must be held responsible not only for the revenues they collect on an engagement, but also the precise costs to the firm that they incur by the way they get the engagement done.

A third reason for under-delegation to develop is that there is a reluctance to invest in the coaching and supervision time necessary to achieve successful delegation. On any single engagement, it will always be more costly, not less, to spend the time to get a junior involved: It will take a junior longer to do it than doing it yourself, and you’ll have to spend time supervising. Consequently, even though more supervised delegation and coaching will reduce costs over time, they increase costs in the short run. This is the old Catch-22. Using the junior person “on this one” is more costly because we haven’t previously trained him or her, so we end up not training the person on this one either. Thus firms tend to under-invest in good coaching, even though they preach it fervently. The problem is that few firms currently have any mechanism to track, on a real-time basis, whether or not good coaching (and hence potential delegation) is being done without such a system, short-term thinking and under delegation result.

A fourth cause is the individual partner’s (understandable?) concern about what the partner will have to do if he or she does push the work down: pay more attention to marketing, client service, coaching, seeking out and working on truly partner-level client work. A systematic effort to push down work that rightfully can and should be pushed down will, if successful, result in a need to find replacement activities for the firm’s partners that truly match their skill and experience level. Fear that it does not exist, or is less comfortable to pursue than staying chargeable on any available work, is, I have learned, a prime contributor to the problem.

Excerpted from ‘Managing the Professional Service Firm’ by David Maister, pages 43-45