The Indispensable Leader: Allocation to Team Resilience

“If you are the only person who knows how to do the roster, manage the equipment, or troubleshoot the EMR, you aren't indispensable—you’re a single point of failure.”

In this episode of Better Every Shift, Naomi and Tubi tackle the dangerous paradox of the "go-to" nurse. We explore why being the only person with the answers feels like professional value but is actually a direct threat to your unit’s resilience. We dismantle the "pleading" style of leadership, where managers treat delegation like a personal favor to "mates" and end up losing their clinical credibility in the process.

From Naomi’s teenage "breathalyzer" strategy to the "E-Myth" concept of working ON the business, we provide a roadmap for moving along the continuum from operational task-master to strategic leader. Stick around to learn why succession planning is one of your most important (and ignored) tasks and how a one-minute "context" conversation can stop a shift from collapsing the moment you go on leave.

Key Discussion Points

• The Delegation vs. Allocation Trap: Why making work personal leads to "pleading" and how to reframe tasks as team resource management.
• Warmth vs. Competence: Finding the balance between being a "dictatorial" rule-follower and a "dithering mess".
• The Power of Context: Why providing the "why" and inviting negotiation makes clinical requests land effectively instead of sounding like an order.
• Managing Resistance: Strategic ways to handle "pushback" by identifying the underlying cause—is it the task, or is the team member just having a difficult day?.
• The Bottleneck Manager: How holding onto tasks because "it’s quicker to do it myself" creates a single point of failure for the entire service.
• Succession as Unit Strategy: Why training staff to do the roster or manage equipment is an investment in whole-service sustainability.
• Working ON vs. IN the Business: Using the E-Myth framework to give your department a secure, resilient future.

What’s In It For You?

You will walk away with a shift in mindset: realizing that you are never indispensable in healthcare and that your true value lies in how many people you have trained to take your place. You’ll gain tactical scripts for providing context and inviting negotiation, ensuring your team feels supported rather than "abandoned" during high-pressure shifts.

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] Intro: The "Single Point of Failure" 
• [00:02:00] Pleading vs. Allocating: Why delegation is never personal.
• [00:04:00] The Credibility Gap: Why "begging" your team fails.
• [00:06:00] Naomi’s Breathalyzer Story: When "right" is delivered "wrong".
• [00:08:00] The 3 Hidden Keys: Context, Connection, and Negotiation.
• [00:12:00] Handling the "Difficult" Team Member: When to pull rank and when to give control.
• [00:15:00] The Manager’s Angst: Why holding on feels safer than letting go.
• [00:18:00] Paediatric Cannulation & Junior Staff: Teaching before you need to.
• [00:20:00] Developing Service Capability: The hidden cost of "it's faster if I do it".
• [00:24:00] The E-Myth Revisited: Learning to work on your business.

About Better Every Shift

Better Every Shift is the podcast for brilliant healthcare professionals who believe that self-regulation and honest reflection are the keys to a better shift. Hosted by Naomi and Tubi, we draw on our lived experience as clinical leaders to help you build your thought leadership and clinical impact.

The "Single Point of Failure" Analogy: When you are the only one who knows the "secret" to the roster or the equipment, you aren't a hero—you’re a bottleneck. Like a single piece of equipment that breaks and shuts down an entire OR, if the unit collapses when you go on leave, you haven't built a team; you’ve built a dependency. This episode is about building resilience, not indispensability.

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"Is nursing turnover eroding your bottom line? Stop managing the crisis and start leading the culture. Book a Strategic Consultation at bettereveryshift.com.au/consultation to turn your clinical culture into a measurable business performance indicator." 

Transcript

0:00

If you're the only person who knows how to do the roster, manage the equipment, or troubleshoot the EMR, you aren't indispensable. You are a single point of failure. In healthcare, being the go-to person for everything feels like value, but it's actually a direct threat to your unit's resilience. You're listening to Better Every Shift. I'm Naomi with Tubi. We believe that your lived experience and your questions are what make you a credible leader. Today we're exploring the paradox of succession planning. Managers often hold on to tasks because it's quicker to do it myself, which creates a massive bottleneck for the entire service. We're going to show you how working on the business through delegation gives your team a secure, resilient future where the unit doesn't collapse the moment you go and leave. I was teaching a workshop about managing priorities. It's one of three workshops around how are we embedding better leadership practices in people stepping up from level one, it's about me and what I need to do, to level two. It's moving beyond me and about what's happening around me, moving people on that spectrum from operational to strategic, moving them more towards strategic. Someone said in the group, delegation's so hard. And I went, Oh, okay, tell me more. What does that mean to you? And they said, But you've come from the team, these are your mates, and you're now telling them what to do. She said, I'm always, I'm so sorry. I've allocated you that patient. I'm so sorry. Was it okay? Or I've allocated you this task and it's really hard, and I know it's hard. I'm sorry about that. And I went, okay, woo, woo, woo, woo. Everybody stop. Let's just have a conversation about delegation. Because what I heard was people make delegation personal, and delegation is not personal, it's part of the role of team leader or manager. Yeah. So I'm curious to know because when I was nursing, there wasn't a lot of level two positions. It was a little bit dead man's shoes. You had to wait for someone to move out or retire completely to get a level two. So, what's been your experience of learning how to delegate? Yeah, I've got a few that didn't go so well. Uh, and I've got a few where I learned a lot. So, similarly, I I've worked in two really different settings where in Central Australia there's such a big turnover, and so if you've been here for a while, you create credibility really easily, and so there's potential to escalate pretty quickly. While I was in Perth, that was not the case. And I was in a team of really strong nurses with a cohort of clinical nurse specialists who were excellent, they weren't going anywhere, and despite my manager saying that I was supported, the opportunity just wasn't going to come up. I had to go outside of that unit to get the opportunity because there were lots of people around. I did get opportunities, but I had to push pretty hard, and they were pretty random, some of them really challenging opportunities because they weren't what other people wanted. What strikes me is that within delegation, and particularly when you're starting to do it and you're in that team leader role as opposed to being in a designated manager role, is that you're often moving quite dynamically between being a team member and being the team leader. Oh, yeah. What's really important as a team member is that you feel like you belong and that you're accepted. And when you're asking for help, you're actually getting someone, you're asking someone to do something for you, but the sense is very much that there will be an exchange. At some point, that other person is going to ask you to do something to help them when you've got a spare moment or come and work with them. When you come into the team leader role, there's much more requirement for that delegation or allocation of work. But the exchange is less obvious because they don't see all the other stuff that you're doing that makes sure that the work that they're doing continues to flow. What they see is you giving them jobs. I'm not sure what the question is to ask, but I think there's something in that in that team leader role, the word I would use is allocation more than delegation. There's an element of delegation. And it's it's not about me. As you alluded to, it isn't personal. This is what the team needs to get done. This is the resources that I've got to use. You are one of those resources in amongst my 10 other people. This is the job that we're going to do, and this is the way that we've allocated it. I feel for the nurse that's pleading with people to do things, I don't think that will ever work well for them. I acknowledge this is going to be a really tough thing today, or I understand that you're already under pressure. The reason I'm getting you to do this is because you have the skills. I know that you will look after this really complicated patient, or I'm going to give you these other resources, or I've got somebody else that's struggling. I think it's really important that leaders don't lose their level of competence when they're asking. And if you're begging, you've actually lost your credibility. And I think that credibility is really important without undermining one of the things that I had to learn. I've been discussing with my one of my kids this week who's had some struggles, and she is the one of my children that takes from me this level of authority and rightness. She has a real justice bent and a real determination that we're going to keep justice, and her strategy for that is to be quite dictatorial that this is the rules, and you'll follow the rules, and you'll just get on with it. She's very similar to me in that respect. So I was a teenager going through high school, and I wanted to make sure that we had a social at school, and there'd been a conversation from teachers and the parents and friends that we might not have a social because the students are quite poorly behaved, and lots of them are coming to the social, perhaps having had some drinks. And so there was a question around it. My solution to that was really simple. Perfect. We will get breathalyzers. I was really adamant that this social is really important. Now, nobody would have come to the social if I set up breathalys, but I was quite adamant that that would work. Thankfully, there were some very other sensible people that came up with some other solutions to that. But that was my take on it. And my daughter does the same thing, and she's come across a few times where she she's got her point and she's not wrong, but her way of getting that message across is really wrong. And I learned that probably a bit earlier than her. Coming unstuck a few times has been helpful to realize that's not the strategy, but neither is being a dithery mess about it either. It's that balance, as Vanessa Van Edwards would say, there's a balance of warmth and competence and a connection. We're fighting for the same cause. This is how we want to do it. I might need to ask you some things about how do we do this really well? What can I take off your plate if I'm giving you this thing? Might need to be part of that conversation. I can talk people into doing all sorts of crazy shit and working really hard because they know that I'm in there with them. I'm not abandoning them. I'm not asking them to do things that I won't do. I may not be able to do it at the moment, but they know that if I've got capacity, I'm not doing it to offload my responsibility, which makes all the difference. What you said is so true, and I think this is often what's missing is that you gave context around why you might allocate something or delegate something. A lot of what happens is people think the context, but they don't speak the context, they just make the ask. And it ceases to become a negotiation, or they don't actively or overtly invite negotiation. So it can be this is a common goal, here's what we need to achieve today. I've allocated you this patient, I recognize it's going to be challenging. What I'd like you to do is tell me if, when you need assistance, when was the last time you looked after this person, whatever it is. One of the things that doesn't come through when we talk about delegation or allocation is there's often a checklist. Is it the right person? Is it the right job? But it doesn't talk about have you provided context, have you connected it to the common goal? Have you invited negotiation? Yeah. This is the hidden bit, but it's exactly as you said, it's what makes those requests land. And a big part of that is those questions won't always come up each time you delegate or allocate. Those questions sit as part of a whole context. What's what things do I normally ask you to do? Do we have a good shared plan? Are you comfortable in asking me questions when you're not sure? And so the amount of context I give you might be different depending on when did I last work with you? Have I worked with you before? Do I feel that you're comfortable to ask me questions? Then I'm going to need to give you more context if I don't think that we've made that connection yet. Whereas a colleague that we've worked together lots and lots of times and they will pick up anytime that I've not quite got it right. It's about the whole picture and then each the context of each of those moments. Another element here is we're not actually good at identifying what we want and asking for help. No. Whether we're part, whether we're a team member or the team leader. I think it's easier if there's going to be an exchange at some point in that team member level, we're less able to ask or to request or to allocate at that team level because we ourselves don't see the exchange. When I had a had my own business, and I went from just being paid by the system to providing a service and taking money directly from the person I had provided the service to. And I really had to get over the ick of that. Yep. Otherwise, I wasn't going to get paid. And what was hard when people challenged me or pushed back? How do you handle people who challenge or push back, not in a reasonable way, but perhaps in an unreasonable way when you've been in that role, in that team leader or manager role? Yeah, so again, the context changes this, right? Firstly, to unpack it a little bit why they challenge it. Is it anything to do with what I've asked them to do, or is it actually to do with other elements of life and today is just a really difficult day? Then I need to manage that element. Is it that they don't understand the request, or they think that they're being treated differently or unfairly compared to their colleagues? The more that you can give that information at the beginning, the less backlash that you'll have. There are some people who are just going to be really difficult. And my strategy for that is to, and we've talked in previous episodes where I've stamped my foot and just said, This is what we're doing. Rarely does that go well. Yeah. Can I do a quick rabbit hole? I've started to open all my management and leadership workshops with hands up, who really loves being told what to do. Anybody? Anybody? I've tried it a lot of times. It doesn't work. It's not a particularly effective strategy. No, it sounds so simple, but it isn't. Do I need to go back and just check the way that I asked? And maybe I needed to provide more context. I have less of this problem now because I am better at the beginning. But those that really have a problem with it, is it something that is just easier to change and put get somebody else to do? And sometimes it is, it's not worth my stress, it's not going to change the outcome that dramatically. And then I can deal with that behavior outside of the situation, which is my preference. I don't really want to have to challenge those behaviors in the middle of all hell's breaking loose. And yeah, we'll deal with that later. If it is a more urgent thing, then I will pull rank, but I do that very, very rarely, and I will circle back to it as soon as I can with a just at the minute, I need you to do this. If not, you need to be elsewhere. And so I do do that, but it is pretty rare. The problem people usually, once you've really gone into context and the this is a team thing, this is not a me thing, most of those challenges usually disappear. But if they don't, then usually giving here's the alternative do this one or this one. And giving them some control, you gets rid of 90% of the problems. It really is that foundation, as you said, of how you're getting much better at setting it up well. Yeah. Particularly for team leads where it's not necessarily something they do all the time. Sometimes they're in the team, sometimes they're the team leader, sometimes they're the team leader of a team that's actually quite experienced or more experienced than they are. It's a really nice way to start is hey everyone, I'm team leader today. If you haven't worked with me as team leader before, here's what you can expect from me. I'm going to allocate really clearly. If you think that I haven't got it right, let me know. Yeah. And I will listen. And I do need to make the final decision because that's a role I'm in today. But I do want to hear your feedback because I might not have it right. Opening that conversation really early, here's what I need from you, can set the tone really nicely within about one or two minutes at the start of a shift. Yeah. It doesn't take a lot. And my language around that is part of my handover. And I will say to people, raise it now. But I will also give them the opportunity to raise it in the next 10 minutes outside of that group. So I'll say, if you see any problems, if there's a challenge, can you let me know if there's something not quite right? One of the other things that comes up with delegation, particularly, is that I would delegate, but there's no one to delegate to. Particularly when you move up the letter a bit more to the manager level and they hold on to things. I've seen a whole bunch of this in talking to colleagues just this week, actually, delegations become a really big topic with people that I'm talking with. Um, and each of them have been in slightly different circumstances, but that delegation and succession planning has been really challenging for different people. The people that are willing to get other people to take on things, not do it as well as they would do, are always in a much better place. That doesn't mean they don't have angst, they absolutely have angst, and they still have a lot of work to do in building people up. But those managers that can do that well have an abundance of people that can do different roles that can move into different spaces and are often supplying staff for other areas because they're good at training them up, probably to their own detriment. Whereas the leaders that can't do that, I don't have anyone to backfill. I haven't got anybody that can do this role. It has to be me. They're staying late, they're which affects their performance. They end up not being able to perform well because they just do it all. That's the real business risk here, is that there becomes a single point of failure in a work area. And so the resilience of that work area, as you rightly point out, is very low. There's a couple of ways this comes up. I don't have anyone to delegate to, as in, I genuinely have lost some senior staff and have not had time to train up these staff, or I've got a huge amount of new grads and very just out of new grads sort of staff. And while they're really good, there are some things they just can't do. For me, then it's how do we want to plan for succession? And what are you going to address first? Getting really clear and strategic about that succession planning. There's another part of it, which is they're gonna not gonna do it the way I would do it. And my response is always when you say you haven't got anyone to delegate to, what's the challenge? I'll get about 50-50. People won't do it the right way, people won't do it the way I think it should be done. And we have then a conversation about policies and the procedures are in place to make sure we've got a standardized approach to things. What layers on top of that is what we think is important. I have a bit of a thing about pediatric cannulation, and we've talked about this before in one of our episodes, where I wouldn't make sure I did all the pediatric cannulations. What I would say to more junior staff is I see are you looking after a kid? It sounds like it's likely they're gonna need a cannulation. How do you go about that? When they would say, Oh, I get the trolley, and then I set it up, and I'm like, Where do you set it up? Yeah. And they'll go, in the cubicle, and I'll go, can I give you a little tip? I've found in my experience, if the child is not watching you set up the needle you're about to put in their arm, they actually are much calmer when you come to put the needle in your arm, and it's usually a little bit easier. The managers that do this well will still end up with periods where they have less people to delegate well to because we have far more turnover than we would like. We are training up people, we move people through, it's and there will be times when that all happens at the same time. We need to have a plan about what we do in those times, and the managers that do well know this six months is going to be really tough. These are the things I'm gonna pull in in that time until we get to this point, and then we can get back to what we normally do and the processes that we normally have. It's easy to become the bottleneck. I've got the knowledge, I've done this ten times, I can do it five times quicker than you. But we become the bottleneck not just for our little processes that then stretches out to other elements of our business, and people aren't taking on and asking questions about what they can do to make that better because they're only seeing this part. So the more that they can see, the more they realise that actually this impact that I'm having here impacts here and here. There's a there is a real element of generosity from the manager's perspective that's required to be teaching people aspects of their role before they need to teach people. So before a week before they go and leave, there's been a plan in place that you're at this stage in your career, therefore you will take a turn doing these different parts of my role and other roles in this work area. And unfortunately, they need to do that in a space where often systems don't support them to do that. In many services, arbitrary rules come in about who can do the roster. Sure, the manager might need to sign it off, but actually the time allocated is probably better having somebody else do it. And if you've got people that can do the roster, now those people have one task that doesn't overwhelm them if they move into the manager space. If you've got other people that can manage equipment, then that element doesn't overwhelm. them if they step into the manager space. If we take the time, which costs money to take on some of those tasks from a system point of view, we are much better at developing them. And that serves not just that unit, but they will then often be the people who are capable to manage other departments when they have lost people and we get a whole service capability and a sustainability that we don't have otherwise. Another thing that I hear a lot from managers is I work really hard to build capability and skills across my team and succession plan and then people go elsewhere and I have to start again. Part of the succession planning needs to be at the level above the ward or the work area and an expectation of a capability of a manager is not only can they succession plan and can they effectively delegate, but are they actually doing it and are they being held accountable for that? Because as you rightly point out, if the whole system is not functioning in that way, then some people again are working really hard and doing a really good job and other people are benefiting from that. I forget just how frustrating that is when they can see I have developed five of my team have gone out and are now managers in other teams. It's really important not to get into arguments over that or get despondent about it. If you are building people up and they are going on to other opportunities and particularly if they're staying within your service, that is a great thing. It is a gap in how we prepare people for those manager roles. Yeah. Because I don't think that succession planning and delegation particularly through the lens of managing priorities on a day-to-day basis and how well that work area can do that is well taught and well understood and it's too easy to say I don't have anyone to delegate. We need to have curiosity in these conversations when people are saying I can't delegate what's the challenge here delegation is one of those things that people get to a high leadership level and they're not good at delegation. And they're not good at succession planning and they don't always see the need being the go-to person, whether you're at that manager level or not but often at that manager level when you are the go-to person there's a sense of value that people feel about themselves provide real value because I'm the only one who knows what it is. So there is an emotional basis often or a sense of worth that people get from being irreplaceable in a service there are costs to that person and there are costs to the service when people put themselves in that position. And you are never indispensable particularly in healthcare people may not replace you with the same level of capability but the job will still be done what's your takeaway for managers to improve the way that they succession plan acknowledge that when you shift from being from working on the floor to being in that manager role you are moving along the continuum away from operational towards strategic and that succession planning is a strategy that needs to be in place that is triggered so there are certain prompts across the career span where people can step up to that next level of responsibility and capability you need to identify what that is and you need to decide what you're going to delegate to them as a result. It doesn't have to be a level in a team it might be qualities that you see identify at what stage what expectations you have at what stage across the career span. Have it documented make it clear make it a process that happens when it's personal it either can look like favoritism or bullying it's your one of your most important tasks. Because it's not the noisiest it's very easy for it to drop to the bottom if you are not thinking about delegation and succession planning you're actually not doing your job. And I say that with care and understanding how difficult it is but it is one of your key responsibilities and you need to work out what that looks like for your team. For me at that next level above the managers and the one above that how are you helping managers to prioritize delegation and succession planning and how are you yourself succession planning across those managers for the next level up there's a really good book called EMyth Revisited and it talks about when you set up a business you're often working on the business and in the business. So you're doing the work of perhaps it's service delivery but you're also setting up processes and systems that actually help the business function. I found that a really clear image but I don't think we talk about we don't talk about healthcare as a business but it is in fact a business from that perspective where you have responsibilities to do your job in the business which might be things like the rostering leave allocation and all that kind of thing but you also need to work on the business and for me succession planning is part of working on the business because it's what gives the business a secure resilient future on your next shift when you allocate work don't just make the request give the context explain what the team is trying to achieve why you've allocated it that way and invite feedback. One minute of context can save hours of frustration fabulous. Thank you for a really interesting discussion. And I'm glad that it's timely if it's something that you've been talking about this week then it must be on people's minds. Brilliant. Wonderful enjoy thanks for listening you can check out the show notes and find lots of further resources at bettereveryshift.com dot via the link below. If you enjoyed today's episode or would love further information we would love you to subscribe and we look forward to seeing BetterEvery Shift