# The Email Delegation Trap, or: How to Become Famous for Doing Nothing

Your boss sends a task to five people with no assignment. Nobody owns it. Everybody owns it. By the time the fallout lands, the compliance seed has bloomed into a magnificent weed, and your boss is shocked—shocked—that this happened.

Here’s the simple model: A manager has a task. A manager has limited authority to assign it. So the manager sends an email to a group and says “figure it out,” which is a beautiful way of saying “I would prefer not to choose.” This is not management. This is consensus-building through strategic ambiguity, which sounds like a board technique and is actually just cowardice wearing a blazer. The comments nail it with the precision of people who’ve watched this movie before: “Miss Management of the year,” “total wuss,” “barely a supervisor.” They’re not wrong. They’re just being polite about it.

But here’s the thing: your boss probably thinks he’s being collaborative. He’s distributing agency! He’s empowering the team! He’s respecting everyone’s capacity to self-organize! And by “respecting,” I mean “avoiding the 47-second conversation where he says ‘Jane, you’re doing this.’ “ The incentive is neat: he saves effort, reduces friction, and if something goes wrong, he can point to the email and say “I asked you all.” Nobody’s in charge, so nobody can be blamed. Seems efficient, in a for certain values of efficient way.

Of course, what actually happens is that everyone reads the email, assumes someone else read it more carefully, and by the time the task is due, it’s a smoking crater. Then the boss is confused. How did this happen? Fifteen people received the email! [The answer, of course, is that fifteen people received the email, which is exactly how it happened.] This is where malicious compliance lives—not in the dramatic sabotage some Redditors were hoping for, but in the quiet, perfect execution of ambiguous instructions. You did what you were asked. You figured it out. You just figured it out together, which means it never got figured out at all.

The real kicker is that your boss will probably send another group email about accountability next week. And the cycle continues, because the one thing harder than managing people is admitting that you’re not very good at it.