

Marion Barraud for HBR

How can a busy professional become more productive when there is only so much time in the day?

One simple answer: Delegate more of what you don’t have to do yourself. This frees up your time so that you can spend it where it is really valuable.

There is nothing new about delegating, of course. Attending physicians delegate to residents, senior consultants to junior consultants, and CMOs to their marketing directors. CEOs, following the example of longtime General Motors CEO Alfred P. Sloan and the recommendation of countless management professors, “manage by exception.”

But just how valuable is delegation? After all, hiring others to work under you is costly, and coordinating them takes up your time and theirs. These costs are highly visible, while the benefits are sometimes less so. The upshot often is managers doing too much themselves.

So in a recent study my coauthor, Luis Garicano, and I decided to quantify the returns of delegation. We turned to the law profession, where partners delegate legal work to associates (and nonlegal work to others, though we did not investigate this). We used data from thousands of law offices on how much partners make, how many associates work with them, and how much those associates and other staff cost the firm in salary and benefits. We combined this data with an economic model to estimate how much lawyers benefit when they work with associates.

Looking across partners who work with associates, we find that delegating work to associates allows the median partner to earn more than 20% more than they would otherwise. Top lawyers, who have the most skill to leverage, earn at least 50% more. We also show that these returns have increased substantially over time as a series of new technologies — from Lexis to word processors to email, and so on — have made delegation easier and less time-consuming. In fact, these gains at the top are so pronounced that they may go a long way toward explaining the increases in income inequality among white-collar workers that have occurred over the last few decades.

Importantly, we find that the partners benefit from delegation even in contexts where it doesn’t come cheap. Legal work is handed to associates who have advanced degrees and have passed the bar, making their labor very costly. But the benefits to partners remain large both because delegating allows them to serve more clients and because clients are willing to pay them more per hour when they are spending less time on routine issues and more on complicated ones.

So should you be delegating — and earning — more? Here are some factors to consider.