She’s That Founder
209 | The Competence Trap: Why Delegation Gets Harder the Better You Are
You can be the most indispensable person in your company and still be operating three levels beneath where you're actually supposed to be leading.
Hey, hey, hey. You're listening to She's That Founder, the podcast for ambitious female leaders who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their business by using AI frameworks for faster delegation and decision-making.
I'm Dawn Andrews, and today you're going to discover why being the most competent person in the room might be killing your power and influence, the four questions that tell you whether you're doing something because only you can do it or because you can do it the fastest, and what actually has to be true before you can hand something off for good so nobody can do it the way I do it stops being your default answer.
So happy Tuesday, Lovey. It is crazy hot here in California, and humid. My hair is piled up on top of my head. I am in my workout T-shirt. I am keeping it so cozy today, and I'm happy to [00:01:00] be sitting here at the podcast mic. And funny enough, the mic is actually the perfect place to talk about this topic, because the podcast has been one of the clearest places in my own business where I've had to confront the difference between being capable of doing something and actually needing to be the one doing it.
I added this podcast to my business in 2022 because I wanted an easier and more creative way to reach more people, to create content, and to let people really understand how I think and what it's like to work with me. And then I got completely obsessed with podcasting. I was booking the guests, organizing the episodes, writing the scripts, recording, editing, producing, building an Airtable database.
Start to finish, I was doing the whole damn thing, which if you've ever even been a guest on a podcast, much less produced one, you know that is insane. It takes forever. So eventually I started handing pieces off, but editing. Editing took me a long time to let go of, because editing was the last gate before something went public.
My voice, my thinking, my point of view, once I finished the edit, I knew exactly what was going out into the world. And here's the thing. I had actually solved the delegation problem, the delegating the editing part of it.
I had instructions. I knew what I wanted cut. I knew what I wanted to stay. I could explain what good looked like in a repeatable way so that it would be true whether it was one episode or all episodes moving forward. So technically there was no reason that I needed to keep doing it, except that editing gave me something incredibly valuable.
It made me feel safe. Because when you own a business, so much of what you do is a best guess. You make the best decision you can with the information you have at the time, you hire someone and hope, you make an investment and hope, you choose a strategy and hope, you send the proposal, you price the thing, you have the difficult conversations, you launch something, you say no to other things.
You can do all the research in the world, and there is still this enormous amount that you simply cannot control. And I think that's why the places where we have some control can be so seductive. Editing was one of those for me. I could listen to every word, I could catch every mistake, I could make just one more tiny tweak, and then I could hit publish knowing, "Okay, this one I know.
I've got this." And when so much of leadership is standing in the middle of uncertainty, making your best call anyway, that feeling is worth a lot. It makes a big difference. The problem is that safety can get really freaking expensive, because I had created the podcast to help me reach more people and grow the business, and then I built a process around it that required hours and hours of me personally making sure it was safe to let the thing out of the building, and that is the trap in a nutshell.
Sometimes we're holding onto work because nobody else can do it. Fair. But are we holding onto it because control is comforting? Because certainty feels good? Because being the last pair of eyes makes us feel protected, and because letting go means accepting something leaders spend a huge amount of energy trying not to accept.
At some point, somebody else is going to make a choice you wouldn't have made. Something may go out that you would've done differently, and you're gonna have to decide whether your job is to eliminate that possibility or to build something strong enough to survive it. And if you've ever caught yourself in that exact spot, still holding something you promoted yourself past two roles ago, that's exactly what we're getting into today.
So here is the thing I know about you, and I mean this as a compliment before anything else. You are good, really freaking good at your job. Your team knows it. Your clients know it. They know that you'll catch the mistake before it ships. You'll remember the detail everyone else forgot. You'll rescue the deadline nobody thought was retrievable, and you'll handle the client who makes everyone else feel super uncomfortable.
You've built your reputation on being the person who can be counted on, and that is not a flaw. That is a real skill, and for a long time, it's the thing that got you promoted, got you trusted, got you into the rooms that you wanted to be in. But somewhere along the way, competence turned into availability, and availability turned into dependence, and nobody sat you down and told you that was what was happening, because from the outside, it just looks like you're doing a great job.
I've watched this play out over and over with the founders and executives that I work with. A woman who's built enormous credibility by being the one who can handle it, whatever it is, and the more she handles, the more she gets sent her way. Because why wouldn't someone do that? She's reliable. She's fast.
She notices what other people miss. She's highly competent. Can I say something here, because I think it matters. Women get rewarded a lot for being reliable, responsive, and helpful, for noticing the thing nobody else caught. Those are genuinely enormous leadership strengths, and I'm not about to sit here and tell you to stop being good at your job.
The problem isn't the skills. The problem is when she can handle it quietly becomes the entire operating model. Because once that happens, you can become more and more important to the business while becoming less and less strategically powerful inside it. Everyone trusts you.
Everyone relies on you. Everyone sends you the hard thing, and somehow you have less and less time to think, to build relationships, to develop your people, and to take the risks that actually move things forward.
Being needed and being powerful are not the same thing. And once you see that distinction, there's a harder question underneath it, because delegation alone doesn't fix this.There's something else going on.
Okay, quick break to pay for the microphones and the people who keep this operation moving. Hey, Lovey. Quick pause, because I know some of you are already mentally listing every single thing that you're still holding onto, and if you want a space to actually test some of this out, like, where to build a standard, where AI can help you turn what's in your head into something that someone else can run, come join our free AI for Founders community on LinkedIn. It's exactly the room for this conversation, and you'll find the link in the show notes.
All right, we're back. Now let's get to the part that's a little more uncomfortable and a lot more useful.
Here's where I wanna go a little deeper than just delegate more, because I don't think that's actually your problem. I think there's an identity question sitting underneath the competence, and most of us never look straight at it. If I stop being the person who can always fix it, who am I?
What if the thing that made you valuable in your own mind was being the smartest, fastest, safest pair of hands in the room? And what happens to that story about yourself the moment your job requires you to let someone else struggle with something that you could solve in 10 minutes? This is exactly where a lot of really competent leaders quietly retreat back into execution.
And I wanna be clear that it's not because they're control freaks. It's because competence feels safe. You know exactly what you're capable of there. Leadership, most days, does not feel safe. It's slower. It's murkier. The payoff is delayed and sometimes straight-up invisible. So the pullback toward the thing you're already excellent at makes complete sense.
It's just not free.
I've sat across from women who are running seven and eight-figure companies who are still approving every proposal, fixing every client issue, personally reviewing every piece of copy, and making every pricing decision themselves. And when I ask why, they say it's because they can do it faster, and they maybe don't trust their team.
But the honest answer, the one that takes a little bit of time to get out of them, is closer to, "If I stop doing this, what exactly am I valuable for?" And the central thing I want you to sit with today, you can become indispensable at work that is beneath the level you are actually supposed to be leading and working at.
At some point, proving you can do the work becomes evidence that you haven't built anyone else who can, and that is an ugly moment when you reach it. So the fix isn't stop helping, and it isn't because great leaders help. The real question is how you tell the difference between jumping in on purpose and jumping in because sitting with the discomfort of not jumping in is harder.
And that's what I want to hand to you next. So here's a tool that I use with clients when they're trying to see this more clearly, because "just delegate more" is useless advice without a way to actually spot where you're stuck. So I call this the competence audit. It's four questions. Run them against anything you're still doing that you probably shouldn't be.
Okay, question one: Am I doing this because only I can do it, or because I'm currently the best at it? And those are not the same question, even though they feel almost identical in the moment. Being the best at something doesn't mean you're supposed to own it forever. So figure out your answer to question one.
Question two: What happens every single time I rescue this? When you jump into rescue, does your intervention actually build capability in someone else? Like, do they become better at it because you jumped in? Or does it just teach the whole system one thing, that you will catch it so nobody else has to?
Every time you rescue something, it's a lesson. Just check who's actually receiving the teaching on that lesson.
Question three, and this one's uncomfortable: What higher value work am I sacrificing to keep doing this? And not the theoretical answer, but the strategic conversation that you keep pushing or the relationship you haven't cultivated, the person on your team who needs development and isn't getting it, the decision that maybe you're postponing, the hour you just need to think that you never protect, or that there's no there there, that because you've been in this lower level work for so long, you actually don't know what to do next.
And that's okay, but we just need to move on
Question four: What would have to become true for someone else to own this successfully? Is it [00:12:00] training, more context, standards, decision criteria written down somewhere, practice reps? Like, what is it? Do they need real authority or a promotion, not just responsibility?
Access to the information? I mean, any of this can be true. And that last question is the one that changes everything, because it moves off nobody can do it like me, which isn't fully true, it's just untested, and onto what have I actually failed to build around this? And that's a completely different problem.
It's solvable. And honestly, this is one of the places I love using AI with clients, turning what's living in your head as instinct into an actual documented standard somebody else can follow. We are early adopters over here for a reason, because it is life-changing when you do this. So if you're a founder that usually shows up as you approve every proposal, fix every client issue, make every pricing decision or exception, you'd say you've delegated because other people are doing pieces of the work, but [00:13:00] everything still runs through your judgment at the end.
Your personal competence is quietly covering for a business design problem. And if you're inside a company, it looks like you've got directors and VPs under you, and you're still the one rewriting the deck, sitting in the meeting your leader could run alone, personally solving the cross-functional fight that should be solved by the cross-functional partners, jumping into execution the second a deadline gets tight.
And you might even get praised for it, which is exactly what makes it so hard to see. You don't need to become less capable. You need to become more discerning about where your capability belongs.
So here's what we covered today. Competence quietly turns into availability, and availability turns into dependence, and that's not a character flaw.
It's just what happens when nobody names the pattern. Underneath it, there's usually an identity question. If you're not the one who fixes it, who are you? And the fix isn't doing [00:14:00] less. It's running the competence audit on the things you're still holding and being honest about what you're actually protecting by holding onto them.
So I want you to actually do this this week. Pick one thing you're still doing that you promoted yourself past a while ago, and run the four questions, and then name specifically what would have to become true for someone else to own it. Not someday, this week. What would have to be true for someone else to own it?
And if you're listening and you're thinking, "This isn't just me. This is happening across my whole leadership team," that's actually a different, bigger version of the same problem. And it's the exact thing I work on with clients through executive coaching, leadership development, and custom programs built for teams stuck in the same pattern.
And if that's where you are, reach out. I'd love to help you build a thing around it. You're not going to become less capable. You're just gonna get a lot more intentional about which problems deserve your attention.
That's it for today's episode of She's [00:15:00] That Founder. I'll see you Thursday. And until then, go get it, girl.
There will always be something you can fix faster than anyone else. Leadership is deciding which of those things are still worth your time. Have a good one, Lovey.
