Hey :) 

I don't think any of this is going to be a surprise to anyone in a leadership position. Most leaders already know what I'm about to say. The challenge isn't the knowing — it's the doing.

What I'm really thinking about is delegation. Specifically, the messy bit where you want to hand something off to someone on your team, and it either takes forever, or it doesn't stick, or you just end up taking it back.

Here's the tension I see all the time: you want people to be competent quickly. You want to move fast. But you haven't quite accepted that it actually takes a bit of time to do this properly — and that impatience is usually what causes the whole thing to break down.

Let's say there's a task you do every week. You'd love to hand it off. Someone else could own it, you'd get time back, and you could start working on things that actually need your attention.

So you show them what to do. They do it. It's not quite right. And then you take it back.

That's the pattern. You take it back because you can't trust that they'll do it the way you want. Your expectations are too high, too early, and you haven't really gone through a proper process of helping someone actually own something.

There's also this question worth sitting with honestly: if something gets done at 80% of your standard, is that actually good enough? Could you live with that? Because the answer matters for how you approach all of this.

And here's the bigger picture — the more you hold on to things, the more you become the bottleneck. The team gets stuck. The business gets stuck. You're the only person in the business who gets paid to protect its future, but if you're buried in daily operations, you're not doing that. And even when you try, the quality of that future-focused work suffers because you're just not getting the time or headspace to do it properly.

What I've found is that if you follow a consistent cycle, you can hand off tasks and projects much faster than you'd expect. It feels like slowing down at first, but it speeds things up because the learning happens properly the first time — instead of badly, repeatedly.

Here's the cycle.

Before anything else, they watch you do it. Talk through your thinking as you go. If it's computer-based, record your screen. At the end, ask them to teach back what they picked up and raise anything that's unclear. If it's something like running a meeting, get them to have a go straight away — even just in a role play. The goal is to tighten the learning loop as fast as possible.

They take over, and you supervise. If it's a meeting, you sit in the room and watch them run it. If it's a computer task, they take the keyboard. Afterwards, you debrief — you share your observations, they reflect on what went well and what didn't, and together you identify what they'd do differently next time. Where it makes sense, you repeat the example to tighten things up again.

They do it solo. Then you sit down together immediately. What did they learn? Where did things go wrong? What went well? If needed, pull them back into step two briefly — walk me through what happened — so the reflection stays concrete, not just theoretical.

This isn't "off you go." It's a proper handoff conversation. What could still go wrong? What doesn't feel clear yet? What does owning this actually look like day to day? If they get stuck, who do they go to? How will they solve problems when you're not around? You slow down here deliberately, because this is where it either properly lands — or quietly doesn't.

It depends on what you're handing off. A weekly team meeting? You could probably work through the whole cycle in a month. By next month you could be completely out of that meeting.

Something more complex — scheduling operations, procurement, ordering — might take three months. You'd break it into smaller components and run the cycle through each one separately. Same process, just applied in layers.

This works at every level. You let go of something, your leadership team takes it on and grows. For them to grow, they need to let go of something too, so the person below them can step up. And so on. It's a waterfall effect, and when it's working, it's genuinely exciting to watch.

The shift it requires from you is becoming more coach-like. Less I'll just do it myself and more how do I help this person own this? That's a different mode, and it takes some getting used to.

But the real question — the one I keep coming back to — is this: what would it look like to just do it right, once?

Not shortcut it. Not give up halfway and take it back. Just go through the process properly, be the teacher for a bit, and see what happens.

Most leaders already know this is how it should work. They just haven't quite believed it enough to actually try it.

🗣️ 👀

Chris.