“You just need to let go.” My knuckles are white as I hold on tighter than ever. The instinct is natural. Why on earth would I let go? I might fall. I might die. At least if I hold on I have some control over my fate. Actually, I really do need to let go. Because I can’t hang on here at the top of the tree while the queue for the zip-line backs up behind me. I’m holding everyone else back. I can’t climb down again – the only option is to step out into mid-air and trust that the harness, the safety net and the people who built this thing won’t let me down.
Delegation can often feel like this – especially when you’ve started a bigger leadership role and simply can’t be all over the detail like you used to be. There aren’t enough hours in the day. But that expertise is what got you here. You knew your stuff. You were in control. Things were done in the way that you judged was best. Isn’t that why you got promoted? No, it’s not. Well, at least not entirely.
We all know the standard tips for ‘good delegation’. Build the team. Set clear goals and deadlines. Check-up on things regularly. Judge the level of risk you’re prepared to take – is this something that you can afford to give a bit of time and iteration to? Or is it so high-stakes or urgent that you need to hold it more tightly? At least that’s what I was taught. But the problem with this is that it still assumes that you ultimately know what the ‘right’ answer is. Delegation becomes an awkward dance in which you let go just a little bit to give someone else the chance to have a go but are always standing there, poised to give ‘feedback’ until it gets to where you think it should be.
This approach is probably OK if the piece of work you’re delegating is fairly straight forward and the process is designed to build capacity in a specific area. But what if you don’t yet know what the ‘right’ answer is? What if you don’t have time to think it through before you have to delegate it (because after all your job just got five times larger)? Then you end up handing over the task with a few steers on what you think the output might look like (cooked up in the 3 minutes before the call while you were waiting for zoom to re-boot). What follows is a painful process where you receive and comment on what emerges against a vague sense of an outcome in your head that you’ve never had time to define. You might still get a good enough result but how frustrating has it been and what opportunity have you missed?
What might a more nuanced approach to ‘letting go’ look like?
💡Change how you think about the process. This is not about letting go of what you want to do, it’s about setting up others to achieve great things with your help. If growth and development of your team is a true part of your purpose – and evidence suggests that in successful organisations it should be – then your goal is not just to get to a ‘right’ answer, it’s to create the conditions in which your team generates a whole range of amazing answers that might never have even occurred to you.
🧱Ensure that you have the foundations in place for this to work. Even if you don’t buy the Netflix fairytale of empowerment and autonomy, the four Cs of their approach are still a handy checklist:
- Clarity – what are we doing to regularly discuss the goal?
- Competence – how are we building a team with the skills to match the task?
- Candour – how can we give each other honest (and kind) feedback?
- Control – what steps are we taking to give those with the best vantage point the freedom to act?
❓Listen to learn. Don’t disguise checking-up as checking-in. Rather than trying to find out whether something you have ‘let go’ of is on track, consider asking: What are we learning? What’s challenging? How are we thinking about it? Ask if advice is helpful before making suggestions. Become a thought-partner in the problem-solving rather than an instructor marking their answers. Even just starting your sentences with ‘we could…’ instead of ‘we should…’ can shift this dynamic.
🤨Get over yourself. Yours is not the only way. By all means contribute your expertise and skill to the person or team you have set up to do the work. That is still partly why you got the job. But giving up on the need to be right is way up there on your leadership to-do list alongside giving up on the need to be in control. So by all means disagree, but then commit. Obviously there will be times when you assert your way but if you’re doing it all the time then you’re really missing out. (PS The sucker here is that as the leader, once you’ve disagreed and committed, you need to take responsibility for the result – giving the credit for success and taking the hit for failure.)
Every leader I work with knows that they can’t simply carry on doing everything themselves, or their way, as they get more senior. They know that eventually they will burn out, or people will leave or the quality of their work will suffer. Or all of the above. Everyone knows the mantra – Invest to Save! – and yet in that moment of fear when something seems to be going off track we grab it back and fix it. Phew. Just this once. Because I had to. Because if I didn’t I might fall. I might die. Next time it will be different. But next time will be exactly the same if we act from a place of fear. I’m not saying throw caution to the wind and jump off the tree. Put the harnesses and safety nets in place – set things up well – and take the step out into mid-air. Because after all, you built this thing and you can trust yourself.
How do you delegate? What has helped you let go?
