Nobody Does It Like You. That’s Not the Compliment You Think.
For years I did everything in my business. Not because nobody else could, though that’s what I told people. Because I didn’t trust them to do it my way, and my way felt like the only way that was safe. I was proud of it. I was also exhausted, and the business was exactly as big as I could personally carry, which turned out to be not very.
The lie in “it’s faster if I do it”
It is faster. Today. The first time you hand something over it takes twice as long, comes back wrong, and you fix it anyway. So you conclude delegation doesn’t work and take it back.
But you’re comparing the wrong things. The right comparison is the hour you spend teaching it once against the hundred hours you’d spend doing it yourself over the next two years. Framed that way, “faster if I do it” is one of the most expensive sentences a person can say.
Eighty percent as good is a hundred percent free
The thing I had to accept: someone else’s version will be different from mine, and often slightly worse by my standards, and that’s fine. The report they write at eighty percent of my quality frees me to do the thing only I can do, which is worth more than the missing twenty. And within a few months, their eighty becomes ninety, and sometimes it becomes better than mine, because they’re doing it every day and I was doing it between everything else.
Delegate outcomes, not steps
My early delegation was a list of instructions. Do this, then this, then this. It produced people who could follow a list and were lost the moment reality didn’t match it. What works is handing over the outcome and the reason. “I need the client to feel they understand their report by the time they hang up. Here’s why that matters. How you get there is yours.” People given the why make better decisions than people given the how.
Decide what only you can do
Write down everything you did last week. Mark the items that genuinely required you: your judgement, your relationships, your name. It’s usually a short list. Everything else is a candidate. Start with the one that costs you the most time and the least joy. Hand it over this month. Then the next.
Check the work, not the worker
Delegation isn’t abandonment. Set a checkpoint, early and specific, and look at the result. Not hovering over the process, which teaches people you don’t trust them. Reviewing the outcome, which teaches them what good looks like. The checkpoints get further apart as the trust is earned.
What I lost and gained
I lost the feeling of being indispensable, which I’d confused with being valuable. I gained evenings, a team that could run without me, and the discovery that several of them were better at parts of the job than I’d ever been. The business grew. It couldn’t while I was holding all of it.
This week
Pick one task you’ve been telling yourself only you can do. Teach it to someone properly, with the why. Accept their first version. Watch what you get back in time.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.