6. The 70% Rule

If your default thought when someone asks for help is "it is faster if I just do it myself," you do not have a time problem. You have a control problem. And it is the most expensive problem in leadership.

In Episode 6 of The Better Daily, Prashant Nagpal, MD shares the moment a mentor told him he was excellent at his job but terrible at letting other people be excellent at theirs, the arithmetic of the 70% rule, and the Jain philosophical concept of anekantavada that finally broke his grip on the work he should have let go of years earlier.

WHAT YOU WILL TAKE AWAY
- Why every task you hold at 90% is preventing the work only you can do
- The three forms of delegation failure: the identity trap, quality anxiety, and the time illusion
- Why "someone else could do it at 70%" is the right threshold, not 90%
- A three-move application for this week:
   1. The Task Audit — sort by who can actually do it
   2. The 70% Handoff — one task, delegated properly
   3. The Identity Question — paid to do the work, or to ensure the work gets done?

EPISODE QUOTE
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." Peter Drucker

ABOUT THE HOST
Prashant Nagpal, MD is Section Chief of Cardiovascular Imaging and Professor of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He trained at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Harvard Medical School) and the University of Iowa.

Opinions are his own. 

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Small shifts. Big life.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If your default thought when someone asks for help is it is faster if I just do it myself, I need you to hear something. You do not have a time problem, you have a control problem. And it is the most expensive problem in leadership. Every task you hold on to because you can do it 10% better than someone else is a task that prevents you from doing the work only you can do. The work your organization hired you for, the work your family needs from you. The strategic, visionary, irreplaceable work that nobody else in your world can contribute. Today we are going to fix that. I am Prashant Nakval. This is the Better Daily Podcast. Let us get into it. Early in my time as a lead for my team, I became the bottleneck for everything. Protocol reviews came to me, manuscript edits came to me, scheduling decisions came to me, quality metrics, equipment evaluations, correspondence with referring physicians, resident evaluations, vendor discussions. All of it flowed through a single point. Me. I told myself I was being thorough. I told myself my involvement ensured quality. What I was actually being was a one-person traffic jam. And here is the thing: the work I was holding on to was not work I was uniquely positioned to do. Protocol reviews, a well-trained junior faculty could handle 90% of them. Scheduling, an experienced coordinator, had better insight into daily workflow than I did. Resident Reviews, another colleague passionate about education. The work I was uniquely positioned to do, the strategic vision for our section, the relationships with hospital leadership, the research direction that would position us for the next decade, the mentoring of faculty who would eventually replace me. That work was getting scraps. My highest value contributions were receiving my lowest quality attention. A mentor pulled me aside one afternoon. He had watched the pattern develop for months. He looked at me and said something that stung so precisely it left a mark. Prashant, you are excellent at your job, but you are terrible at letting other people be excellent at theirs. That sentence restructured how I think about leadership. The principle is simple. If someone else can do it 70% as well as you, delegate it. Not 90%, not 80, 70. Why 70? Because that person will get to 90 with practice, guidance, and feedback. They might eventually do it better than you because they bring a perspective you do not have. But they will never get there if you never give them the opportunity. Your refusal to delegate is not protecting quality, it is preventing growth, theirs and yours. Here is the arithmetic most leaders refuse to do. While that person grows from 70 to 90 on the delegated task, you are free to invest those hours in the work that only you can do. The net output of the system goes up, not down. You are not losing 20% on one task. You are gaining 100% of your time back on higher value work. That is not a trade-off. That is a multiplier. In Jain philosophy, there is a concept called anekanthavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness. Reality is perceived differently from different viewpoints. No single perspective captures the complete truth. Applied to leadership, it means something practical and liberating. Your way of completing a task is one valid approach. It is not the only approach. It might not even be the best one. When you delegate, you are not accepting inferior work. You are accepting that multiple competent paths lead to the same destination. And some of those paths might reveal things you would never see from your own vantage. Delegation failure comes in three forms. The identity trap. You build your career on being the person who delivers. Execution is not just your skill, it is how you see yourself. Delegation feels like giving away a piece of who you are. The reframe, and it took me years to accept it, is that your identity must evolve from the person who does the work to the person who builds the capacity of others to do it. That is not a step down, it is a step up. You doing the work does not scale. You building people who do the work scales indefinitely. Quality anxiety. You worry the output will not meet your standard. Honestly, it probably will not, at least the first time. The solution is not to take it back. The solution is to invest upfront in clear expectations and early feedback. Define what success looks like specifically. Set a check-in at 30% completion so you can course correct early rather than redo at the end. The time you spend on a proper handoff pays for itself a hundred times over. The time illusion. It feels faster to do it yourself in the short term. And for the next 30 minutes, yes, it is. But you are optimizing for today at the expense of next quarter. Every task you hold today is a task you will still be doing in six months. Delegation is not an expense. It is an investment with compounding returns. Here is your application for this week. Move 1. The task audit. 20 minutes this weekend. List everything on your plate. Sort into three categories. Only I can do this. Someone else could with guidance. Someone else could today with minimal instruction. Be brutally honest. Category 1 is smaller than you think. Move 2. The 70% handoff. Pick one task from category 2. Delegate it properly. Explain the why, not just the what. Define success. Set a check-in. Then step back. Do not hover. Do not rewrite. When it comes in at 75 instead of your 95, give feedback. Coach. Let them iterate. Move 3. The identity question. Am I being paid to do the work or to ensure the work gets done? If the latter, and for most leaders it is, your primary job is capacity building. Act accordingly. Here is the clinical frame, and it matters. In radiology, we use standardized protocols for every type of study. The slice thickness, the contrast timing, the reconstruction algorithm. We do not reinvent these for every patient. We decided once, validated through evidence, and now they run automatically. That frees the radiologist's cognitive energy for the part that actually requires judgment, interpreting the image, finding the abnormality, making the diagnosis. That is where human intelligence is irreplaceable. And it can only function at its best when it is not buried under decisions that should have been made upstream. Your leadership is the diagnosis. Everything else is protocol. Delegate the protocol, protect the diagnosis. Peter Drucker wrote, There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. The 70% rule is uncomfortable. It requires watching someone do imperfectly what you could do perfectly. It requires patience that feels like inefficiency. But the alternative, doing everything yourself forever is the real inefficiency. It just does not feel that way in the moment. I am Prashant Makpal. This is the Better Daily Podcast. Small shifts, big life. I will see you in the next one.