You set outcomes and step back. Decisions stay with the team, the plans are theirs, you are not in the working sessions, and the work goes out without your review. When it works, this is the style every management book describes and almost nobody runs: a team that owns its week and a manager who owns the direction.
Here is what it costs, and it depends entirely on who you are managing. With a senior, stable team, Sponsor is the right style and your job is to stay out of the way and to be reachable. With anyone new, junior, or under pressure, Sponsor reads as absent. They do not know what good looks like because you have not shown them, they do not know how they are doing because you are not in the room, and they hear from you when something has gone wrong, which teaches them to hide things.
The tell is your Contact bar. If it is very low, your people are getting outcomes and nothing else. Outcomes without contact is not delegation. It is hoping.
Sponsor is also the style leaders adopt when they are stretched too thin rather than when they have chosen it. If you have more than eight direct reports, or you are running a function and a team at once, check whether this is a style or a symptom before you decide it is working.
The question I ask to tell the two apart is simple. What did your team decide last week that you would have decided differently, and how do you know? A leader who has let go answers quickly. They know the decision, they know why it went the other way, and they chose not to overrule it. A leader who has left cannot answer. Not because the team made no decisions. Because nobody told them, and they did not ask. Letting go is a choice you make with full information. Leaving is what happens when the information stops reaching you.
One change for this week. Get into one working session per team, with no agenda of your own, and say nothing for the first half. You will learn what your team thinks good looks like, and you will find out whether it matches what you think. If it does, you are a Sponsor. If it does not, you have been one by accident.
Next step: if your span is the reason you stepped back, measure it with the span of control calculator. If your team is senior and this style is deliberate, the one on one is your main instrument; score it with the 1:1 meeting builder.
Next step
The other results
- ForemanYou set the how and you are in the work.
- GatekeeperYou hold the calls and you are not in the room.
- PartnerYou are in the work and you do not hold the pen.
About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Management Style Quiz, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.