Why Do I Keep Stepping Back In?

You delegate. You build a capable team. You genuinely want others to take ownership. 

So why do you keep stepping back in?

In this solo episode of The Pause Before You Lead, Heather explores a pattern she noticed in her own leadership while working with her virtual assistant. Despite intentionally delegating work she no longer wanted to own, she found herself repeatedly getting involved again. Rather than assuming the problem was someone else, she paused to ask a different question:

What's happening in me that's causing me to keep stepping in?  

As you listen, consider this question:

Where might I accidentally be teaching my team that everything still needs to come through me?  

If you've ever found yourself saying, "It's just faster if I do it," this conversation is for you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, I'm Heather Haig. Welcome to the pause before you lead. My co-host Alicia is taking some well-deserved time away for a few weeks. And I'm taking this time to put together a short series of solo episodes exploring a few of the questions around leadership that keep showing up. As always, this is an invitation not just to find answers, but for us to take a moment to pause, explore, reflect, and perhaps see something that we didn't see before. So join me in this conversation. I've been thinking a lot about this question recently. And it's why do leaders keep stepping in? I find this topic fascinating because both as a leader myself and as a coach to leaders, there is a desire to delegate to the team. I think that this is a universal. Leaders who build out teams want to be able to delegate things to the team, take things off their plate, and yet there seems to be a struggle where we keep stepping back in. So despite all of our best intentions, something keeps drawing us back in. And so today let's just look at what may be happening. I'm not sure what we'll discover together. But let's begin. For the last 18 months or so, I have been working with a virtual assistant. And I was so excited to hire a virtual assistant because there are so many things that I do in my day-to-day that I'm thinking, is this the best use of my time? And I think this is one of the threads in leadership that we see. Like, are you doing all the things? Should you be doing all the things? And are the things you are doing the most important things or the greatest value that you can add in the things that you do? And so for me, hiring a VA, a virtual assistant, bringing someone onto the team made a lot of sense so that I could delegate the things that weren't the best use of my time and focus more on the things that are the best use of my time. And what I noticed as I started that journey was despite identifying the things that I wanted to delegate, once I started the process of delegation, I noticed some resistance. And it was, it was both curious and frustrating at the same time. So this may be something that you experience is like there's this clarity that I want someone else to do this work because A, it's not my area of greatest impact or greatest benefit, but also it drains my energy doing it. So if someone else gains energy from doing it, wouldn't it be better to give that to that person? And so certainly in working with this virtual assistant and us ensuring that we were aligned in the things that they are best at and the things I wanted to offload, it was surprising to me as we went through the process how much resistance, even at the initial stages of passing things over, I was feeling. And um I still wanted to get the value, right? So I feel the resistance, I'm noticing the resistance. I passed those things on to the individual that I'm working with. And I don't know if I noticed it right away. It was probably in the first three months, maybe, because in the beginning, there's a lot of back and forth as someone starts to take on something you used to do, right? There's a lot of sort of clarification, and and did I mean this or maybe I mean that, right? So I expected there to be a period of time of transition in delegating something to someone else that would happen in that process. But I think about three months in, what I started to notice was how often I was stepping back in. Even though the individual I'm working with was doing the things that I was asking them to do, sometimes I still found myself stepping in. I still found myself, I don't know if I would say wanting to take it over. I'm not sure it was a conscious thing, but I could feel myself like I'm back involved in that stuff again. Like, why is this happening? And the frustration that came from that as I started to notice that I was stepping back in. And one in particular, we were, we were working on some website development for my website. And I would, you know, give the content, pass it along to her. She would do an excellent job in completing it. And I would still be getting involved in the things that I had delegated to her. So, you know, you have to I think the natural tendency is to sort of look at the other person and say, are they not doing the job the way that I wanted? Is there something that I need to be giving feedback on and refinement? But more importantly was the looking inward and taking the time to sort of say, like, what's happening for me that's causing me to keep stepping in? I was clear on my intention to delegate this work. I was clear in the ask of what I wanted done in the work. That work is being fulfilled by the individual, and still I'm stepping in. When what's that all about? And at first blush, I had to kind of answer the most obvious, staring me in the face like, am I a control freak? Because like I say I want this, but my actions are not aligned with what I'm saying I want and what's really going on there. And so, yes, there definitely is like a control piece that was showing up for me that I needed to sit with and and assess. And okay, so if we just go, I'm a control freak, that's fair. Maybe that's maybe that's true. How does that help understand my own behavior and what's what's happening within me? But sitting with it a little bit longer, and I think this is the part that sometimes gets hard for all of us as leaders, is to actually pause because the initial reaction I had was let's just jump into action and have a conversation with her and and you know, sort of make sure I've clearly articulated what I'm wanting. Well, but that wasn't actually what the problem was. The problem was happening in internally with me. And so by pausing and kind of sitting with it and going, okay, we could, well, we can label it as a thing, like control freak, but let's get at the underneath part of this to understand what are the drivers going on within me. And what I started to notice was there were times where in the back and forth of clarification, I felt impatient. And I would just, my gut feeling was it's just faster if I do it. And I don't think that's as much about control as it's maybe more about impatience or um struggling to clarify and articulate things in an effective way. So the resulting reaction is, let me just do it. But how many times have I just done that, just stepped right back in, versus recognizing like how someone else becomes really good and successful in their work in our partnership, is by taking that time, by being sure I'm understanding what I'm actually asking, by checking in and saying, have I clearly given directions based on how someone else learns or how someone else thinks about things? And I mean, even more importantly, is sometimes the questions being asked were things I hadn't even thought about. And so instead of me just doing it, maybe that exchange could give me more insights so that I could think about things a little bit longer and say, huh. Well, I know when I when I wrote this content, this was my intention. But now that you've posed that question, I'm thinking, starting to think about this a little bit differently. And I think this is the beautiful thing that all of us as leaders maybe miss sometimes, is that in our speed and the pace of things we're just trying to get done, like I can do it, I know what I want, I'll do it faster, just let me do it. We're actually missing the beautiful gifts that come from collaboration, where someone else seeing something differently and asking a question in a different way gets us thinking differently. And the end result might be even better. So I noticed not only my tendency to step back in, but also the potential impact of my tendency to do that, not only on the dynamic between myself and the assistant that I was working with, but also in the collaborative output that might come from her challenging me, posing questions to me, and that and us both taking a little bit longer in the work. So ultimately, I think what we need to be doing is to say, wow, am I creating a pattern? Like, is this a one-off or is this a pattern? Do I do this regularly? And once we know if we're doing it regularly, it's starting to sort of break that pattern faster. And I love this idea of like, we're not trying to totally overhaul the way we operate. But for me, it's like, how can I notice a pattern and then start to change that pattern through intentional interruptions to the pattern. So actually catching myself before I step in, because I can, I can feel the sensation in myself when I'm like, oh man, this is just taking too long. I'll just do it. Like I can feel, I could feel that happening in my body. So tuning into that a little bit more and and slowing down to say, yep, I'm noticing I'm I'm about to step in. And in that pause, pose a question instead of taking an action. Right? Like what am I feeling needs to be different here? And how can I approach this in a different way? And I think for me, one of the things that helps once I catch a pattern is to try and engage with the other person. Help me understand your thinking, maybe. Right. So help me understand a little bit more what you're needing, because that might help feel like the process is moving a little bit faster rather than me just jumping in. The other thing that I think could be a possibility is to, is to say, especially in an email exchange or, you know, in it with today's technology, people are sometimes using Instant Messenger to communicate with teams or some sort of platform. It's like, let's just both take a pause, get in a room or get virtual together and decide how to proceed from here versus my old mode of just stepping in. So finding some strategies once you've identified the pattern to be able to say, okay, I know I want to delegate to you. I keep stepping in, I'm gonna interrupt that pattern. And maybe the takeaway today is to be thinking about where might I accidentally be teaching my team that everything still needs to come through me. So yeah. And as we wrap, I encourage you to share this conversation with people in your network who you think could take value from this conversation to subscribe so that you get new releases of of solo and our co-hosted episodes to come. And don't forget to pause before you lead. See you next time.