Lia (00:00)
Managing people is hard, leading a team is hard, running a business is hard. All of these things are hard because you're dealing with people. I've often asked when it comes to leading teams, what is one of the hardest places where most people get really stuck? And feedback is up there. But I think the place where we get the most, most stuck, whether we are running a team of one and it's a virtual assistant, or we have a team of thousands.

we've been managing one day or we've been leading folks for decades where people get the most stuck is with delegating. Because delegating is where everything comes together. Delegating brings in, do I trust my teams take this on? Do I trust myself to set expectations the right way? Do I even know what success looks like? Have I defined performance? Delegating requires a lot of leadership skills all rolled into one. And if we have

missed check in the box on any of those areas, then the process breaks down and we don't know why, we just know I tried to hand something off and it didn't work. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. This hard, hard thing of delegating effectively, a couple shifts to make to get it right and how much it unlocks. Let's do this.

Now we all know we should delegate. When I talk about it with leaders, they're always like, of course I need to delegate more, I need to let stuff go more.

Some leaders say, the biggest shift I've ever made in my work was learning to delegate, letting things go. And I think even that leader has opportunity to figure out more things, right? Because we can always get better at figuring out not just can I hand off tasks efficiently, not just can I let go of things I don't want to be doing, but how can I hand off the ownership of an outcome so that I'm not still making the decisions.

I think we can often confuse delegating for dispatching. And I think about dispatching is like if you're playing fetch with a task, throw the ball out there, hey, team member, go look this up and bring me the answer. Go schedule this meeting and then go tell me, go do this and come back. And when we play fetch with a bunch of tasks, yeah, we might free up some time. I think we need to do that at least.

but we have not removed ourselves as a bottleneck, because we're still reviewing every step. And it's not true delegating, because that person can't make more than one step at a time. So you're kind of putting a ceiling on what your team member can get done, because you're still the review step at each point. Now, what is the cost of this? Well, first of all, you aren't able to get distance away from that thing, because yeah, maybe they did some research and save you some time a little bit, but you...

because you have to stay connected to that, it's always gonna be on the top of your mind. You'll always be spending time and energy on that. So it only gets you so far. But the cost is actually a lot bigger for that team member. When someone feels like I'm just going to get something and come back to you, they don't build a sense of ownership around that actual task or the thing that they're working on. They're just looking up this whole thing. let's say there's a big event that you're preparing for.

and you told a team member, okay, go look for venues and come back to me and I'll pick one. Okay, go look for options for catering and come back and I'll pick one. Go look at options for table rental and come back and I'll pick one. You know, maybe imagine when you were planning your own wedding, if you were doing it yourself, right? You're looking at one individual thing and you're coming back to it. That person is just giving you options and coming back. They're only playing this role of aggregator researcher. What would the difference be if you said, hey, I want you to...

plan this wedding now or this event, whatever, let's say it's an opening party or for your company or a big holiday thing or a client gathering, whatever it is. And it's a big event, high stakes. You're gonna be bringing folks in the door. You wanna use it to really build up excitement around your business. So it's an important event. And you said, I want you to design what could be the best possible event. I'm gonna still need to be approving a lot, but I want you to really own this.

Own the vision for this and let's talk about what that looks like. Come back to me with options of how all these different pieces could come together. If you hand it off the bigger picture of this event that has to do this thing and we're gonna wanna get this kind of visibility, it's gonna have this many people and these different things, this person can now put together a broader vision that they're then owning and carrying out. Then asking them, okay, let's figure out catering. They might come back with this whole, okay, well,

because the theme is this, I thought this catering would be good and that really goes with this kind of table set up and this sort of bar thing over here. Now you're getting them to think bigger and more holistically. And then they're thinking about the stuff that you didn't have on the list. Maybe they say, oh, well, this whole, know, with this motif for the food, we need to get a ice sculpture and a chocolate fountain and have this sort of like activities out here because you've given them the opportunity to think bigger and broader. You've given them space to play.

That's the beauty of true delegating. We're handing off the outcome. It doesn't mean we're not involved. It doesn't mean we can't weigh in. It doesn't mean we don't communicate the points in which we wanna weigh in. It doesn't mean we don't communicate the vision upfront. I think in that example with an event, we wanna paint the picture of what is the best event that we can envision and say, hey, this is the standard. How can we outdo that? Or this is what we wanna get done. This is our budget.

how can we make the best possible thing within those guardrails? You can still paint the vision, but then you wanna give your team member space to be creative, figure that thing out. And that's where the magic is because now you freed up so much of your time, you're letting this person run with it. You're letting this person really go big and come back with ideas that you hadn't thought about before. And they're not stopped at every two seconds because you have to approve something and review it.

When we're thinking about delegating, a lot of us right now are thinking about not just between ourselves and our team members, but how are we thinking of utilizing agents and skills in Claude and all of these kind of new sorts of automations that are available to us. And we actually have to use a very similar process. So I've been working a lot with my clients on figuring out how to incorporate something like Claude code into their workflow, how to give their team members superpowers. And this is something that really comes with that conversation of

how do we define the scope of this task that we're having Claude run with? How are we giving it the right inputs? How are we defining success? How are we saying exactly what we want to, setting the context exactly we want to come away with? We're doing the same thing. So I think one of the places we can get frustrated and stuck when we are figuring out how to fold AI in is we're doing the dispatching thing. We're saying, up this thing and then we still have to do all of this other work. We're saying, no, that's wrong, that's wrong. Find me another one, find me another one.

and we're not utilizing the full horsepower of it. It's almost a Google search without Gemini, right? Just like kind of old school search as opposed to defining an outcome and utilizing it the best it can. And I say that because I think it's a thing that we want to be really incorporating our workflow when we're thinking about AI. It's not, it doesn't help as a shortcut until we've actually solved this underlying problem.

of shifting into the outcome mode. Again, there's gonna be some things that you just want a quick answer and of course that's fine. You may say, well, I don't know if anyone is ready to take over that whole outcome that I wanna hand off. What do I do if I don't have anybody that can do that? Then my question is, what about a piece of the puzzle? Let's say you are, you you're the primary person that has like business, new business conversations or sales conversations with new clients.

and you have other team members and there's a lot of work that goes into that, but like that's some of the magic and that's why maybe, know, folks work with you because you build that relationship up front and it's like, obviously you're not gonna hand that piece off. And so you maybe have decided nothing about that whole area can be delegated, but I would push back on that. And this came up for me in a training I was doing with engineering managers a few years ago at Google. And it was, the training actually came to be because folks were struggling with time management.

And so I was brought in to do a workshop on time management for engineering managers. But come on everybody, when we have a time management issue as a leader, the whole conversation is about delegating. And so this training ended up being about how to really build our muscles delegating and shifting from dispatching to true delegating. And when I was talking about that, a lot of folks said, hey, I've got capable people, I've got a great team, but there's...

there's just some stuff that like I can't hand off, know, writing performance reviews. I can't hand off kind of defining, you know, the approach for my team of how we're gonna, you know, divide the work up over this project. I can't hand off, I'm not just gonna throw my whole job over to another team member. And I said, listen, I get it. Okay, you're a smart person. We're doing this workshop at Google, right? This is not about handing over your job. You're not handing the keys over to your business. You're not handing over your title as manager. You are finding what is a piece of something.

that maybe somebody could still own end to end. And so with this example with this engineering team, I said, okay, well, could there be a piece of the project scoping where someone is doing some of the research upfront and they come back to you instead of just looking up one thing with a proposal for how we move forward? Or if someone is, or if one of the big things that you're figuring out is kind of the roadmap for the next few cycles, could you delegate a piece around aggregating

what are the roadmaps for other teams that your work's gonna intersect with? So that you're giving someone something to, and they own the kind of cross team collaboration, aggregation and strategy piece that will then plug into your bigger vision. And as we talked about that, we started to say, well, what are meaningful work kind of task projects that we could hand off that actually give that person an opportunity to lead and build relationships and build up their skills? And then,

really enhance your own ability to do your role the best. And it was about shifting away from, either have to give people tasks like read this one email and answer one question or do my job for me. We thought it was this all or nothing. And it's totally not, it's everything else I would say. So when you're feeling nervous about delegating and you're thinking, I don't even know if this person's ready. I don't even know if this or that. I don't have two seconds to even stop and delegate. Now we get into some of the strides down.

on how to delegate, which is a whole other conversation. I have a ton of that in the new manager playbook. But what I wanted to talk about today was how do we even put a mental model around delegating so that we can put the right system in place? And I know I talk a lot about systems. This is truly just the framework in our minds. Like, okay, when I'm gonna delegate something, I first think about what done looks like, what success looks like. I then think about, well, where do I wanna weigh in?

I then think about what are some of the of context that folks are gonna need to be effective. And then I set expectations and like you've kind of been one, two, three, four, five, you've worked backwards on five foundational repeatable things that we do to delegate. That's our delegating system. It's as simple as that. And it can be hard to define that. It can be hard to think, I don't even know where to start. It can feel like I don't even have two seconds. I should just do it faster, do it this way.

but that is where we're not utilizing the horsepower of our team. And when we're thinking about how do I build a profitable team? How do I get myself out of the weeds so that I'm not making every decision? These are the moments. Like this is the actual like tool you have. And again, if you're thinking about, well, I would rather use an agent than hire someone else or I wanna figure out how to actually make that feel full of that in my workflow, you're gonna be pretty frustrated utilizing.

AI if you're not actually answering those questions anyway. They've got to be answered either way. So delegating is truly the way that we scale. It's how we unlock so much. It's how we actually know what we need to be focusing on, how we can really put our team members in the right moments, right situations. It's how we save time. That's why any conversation, again, I said it, any conversation that's about time management, that's about burnout, that's about being spread too thin, that's about being in the weeds, that's about

⁓ I keep telling my team members to do this, they're not getting it. All of those things are all tied up with delegating. And the big piece is the shift from dispatching into delegating. And then we set the expectations, we set the context, we define when do need to be looped in, what decision we still need be making, and then we let that person run with it. Because...

We've hired people so that they can make us better, make our team members better. And if we want a carbon copy of ourselves and we've made our own virtual, you know, clone, we still have to define how we make decisions and how we would just make decisions because that thing cannot read our mind right away either. So we're gonna be using the same process. And if you're eager to figure out how to use some of these automations in your workflow,

figure out Claude skills on your team, how to give your team members superpowers. This is a place that I have been supporting teams that is unlocking so much. It's not replacing people, it is giving them superpowers and is solving those problems of, gosh, this person is taking so long to this repeatable task and I need them over here. Or why are we reinventing the wheel every time we could have a better way? This is the way that we are using Claude skills.

with my clients and they're seeing all of this efficiency overnight. If that's something you wanna look into, something you wanna bring your team, reach out at hello at leagraph.com. It is, I am so excited about this because if you're a long time listener, I've been big on we gotta slow the reins around AI. We need people, we cannot just decide, I don't need anybody anymore. I feel like I have unlocked for my clients.

the yes and with it. And for myself, I'm figuring out how to utilize it in ways to bring information and research together. So it frees me up to do things like the podcast, right? That I love to do. So again, if you wanna explore this with your team, there's so much out there, it's really exciting and I'd love to support you. So reach out to liagarvin.com or hello at liagarvin.com and I will see you soon. See you next time.