What Good Delegation Actually Requires

Speaker A: You didn't start your business to be the bottleneck, answering every question, fixing every fire, and stuck in the weeds of business operations. Hi, I'm Donna Dubay, certified Director of operations. And I've been where you are, doing all the things, convinced hustle was a sustainable strategy. But here's the truth. No team, system or automation can fix a business that lacks focus and direction. This podcast is your weekly dose of real talk and practical strategy, from workflow optimization to business systems and strategic planning. The kind of behind the scenes work that actually moves the needle. If you're ready to step into your CEO role and build a business that's scalable and sustainable, let's do it. Hello, hello and welcome back to the podcast CEO Amplify. I'm your host, Donna Dubay. I'm so glad you're here today. Before we get into anything, I need to just stop and. And mark this moment, because this is episode 150. 150 episodes of the CEO Amplified podcast. I honestly don't have words for that. When I started this show, I remember sitting in my office thinking, okay, let's see if I can get to 10. 10 episodes really felt like a real goal. 10 felt like proof that this was a real thing, you know? And now here we are at 150. And I just keep saying that number out loud because it doesn't quite feel real. But what really gets me, what I think about when I think about 150 episodes, is you. The fact that you keep showing up week after week. You fit this into your morning, your commute, your lunch break, that weird in between time, when you're not quite ready to get back to your desk, you choose to spend that time with me on your business, thinking about how to be a better CEO. And I do not take that lightly. Not for one second. So before we talk about anything else, can I just reach out a huge thank you, A huge thank you from the bottom of my heart. 150 episodes wouldn't exist without you listening to them. So this celebration and this excitement is as much yours as it is mine. Okay, that's enough of that. I promised myself I wouldn't cry. So let's get into it. Episode 150. Let's make it count. Today we're talking about delegation. And I know what you might be thinking again, like, we've already talked about delegation. It's. It's everywhere. And there is a lot out there about delegation. How to let go, how to trust your team, how to stop being the bottleneck. But I want to talk about something almost I never hear anyone say the thing that I think is actually sitting underneath it all. The real reason delegation keeps failing. Even for business owners who are genuinely trying to. Even for owners who have good teams, even for owners who want nothing more than to get things off their plate. So, are you ready? This is it. You can't delegate a result you haven't defined. That's it. That's it, my friends. You can't delegate a result you haven't defined. That's the whole episode. Everything we talk about today is just unpacking that one sentence. And I think by the end of this, you're going to look at your team and at, uh, yourself very differently. So let me start by painting a picture. Let's see if this sounds familiar. You have something on your plate that you know you shouldn't be doing. You've been carrying it for weeks, maybe even months, telling yourself that you'll hand it off when the time is right. And finally the time is right, you hand it off and you feel good about it. You feel like a real CEO for about 48 hours. And then what happens? Well, what happens is that it comes back not catastrophically wrong, not what were they thinking wrong, just not what you had in your head off in a way that you can't quite articulate, but you know immediately you can feel it. So what do you do? You fix it quietly, you sit down, you rework it, you do it yourself, and you don't make a big deal of it, because, honestly, what would you even say? And somewhere in the process of fixing it, a conclusion starts to form. Maybe it's about that specific person. She's just not ready for this kind of work. Maybe it's about your team more broadly. Well, they're good at the basics, but you m. Know this is a little bit above their level, maybe. And this is the one that really bothers me. Maybe it's about you. I'm just too particular. My standards are too high. This is just how it is when you care as much as I do and you take that task back and you keep it, and this cycle continues. So I want to stop that cycle today. Because that conclusion, as logical as it might feel and as much as the evidence seems to support it, it's wrong. Not because your standards are too low, not because your team is secretly brilliant and you just can't see it, but because you diagnosed the wrong problem entirely. Okay, I want you to think about a game. You know, those drawing games like Pictionary or Think there's some for your phone, where one person draws and everyone else has to guess what they drew. Here's what makes those games work and what makes them hilarious when they don't. The person drawing has a word, right? A clear, specific word in their head. And their entire job is to get that image out of their head and onto the page in a way that someone else can understand. And when it works, it looks easy, doesn't it? And when it doesn't work, when the drawing is just, you know, some sort of squiggle that doesn't make sense to anyone else, what do we do? We laugh. We say, how did you get to that? But the truth is, the problem was never the guesser. The problem was the drawing. The image of the drawers in the drawer's head never made it to the page in a way that was transferable. Now think about your last delegation attempt. You had a picture in your head, a clear, specific picture of what this task should look like when it's done well. And your job, even though we never framed it this way, was to get that picture out of your head and into someone else's hands in a way they could actually work from. Did you do that? Or did you hand them the pen and say, draw this without ever showing them the word? Because here's the thing. The standard exists. It is real, it is specific, but it lives entirely in your head. When your team member gets the task, just the task, and then has to somehow produce a result that matches a picture they've never seen. And when it doesn't match, what do we do? We call it a delegation failure. It is not. It's a clarity gap. And clarity gaps, those belong to the leader, not the team. You can't transfer something you haven't packaged. You can't expect someone to meet a bar you. You haven't shown them. And honestly, and, uh, I'll say this with much love, but most of the time when I ask business owners to describe their standard out loud, they struggle because they've never really had to put it into words. They just know it when they see it. Or more accurately, they know it when they don't see it. This is not a standard. You, you can delegate. That's a feeling. And feelings don't transfer. I had a client, let's call her Jane, who had tried to delegate the same task to the same person twice. The first time, she handed it off in a five minute conversation. She told her what to do, she gave her a deadline, and she walked away feeling like she, she's handled it. And the task came back wrong. Not terrible, just wrong. It was off. So what did Jane do? She spent an entire weekend reworking it, and when she was done, she had quietly written that team member off. This is not the right fit for this kind of work. So Jane and I talked about it, and I asked her a few questions. I said, did you ever tell her what a good version of this looks like? There was a pause. Did you tell her why this task matters? Like what it connects to and what happens downstream? This pause, if this task goes sideways, it was a longer pause. Did you tell her what decisions she could make on her own and what to bring back to you? Silence. She hadn't done any of it. She handed off the task and assumed everything else would follow. The standard, the context, the judgment. Well, she kept all of that unknowingly, while expecting a result that required all of that. So the second time around, we did things a little bit differently. Second time, same person, same type of task. But this time, before the handoff, Jane spent 15 minutes getting genuinely clear. She wrote down what done looks like. She gave a little bit of context, why this matters and what it affects for the rest of the business. And she said explicitly, these are the calls you can make without me. Just let me know what you decided, and guess what happened. Same team member, same type of task. It came back right on the first try. Same person. What changed was the transfer. What changed was that Jane finally showed someone the word before handing them the pen. So here's what I want to leave you with today, and I want you to actually sit with this. Not just nod, nod and move on to the next thing. Think of one task you've taken back recently, something you handed off and reclaimed because it didn't come back the way you wanted. Now, ask yourself this. Could you write down the standard for that task right now in a paragraph clear enough that someone who's never worked with you could read it and know exactly what you're looking for? If the answer is no, even a little bit, then the problem was never your team. You handed someone a pen and expected them to draw a picture that you never showed them. And when the squiggle and the drawing that they made didn't match the image in your head, you decided they couldn't draw. That's not fair. And, uh, more than that, it's not accurate. Delegation is not about trusting your team more. It's not a mindset shift. It's not about letting go. It's about getting clear enough on your own standards that you can actually hand them to someone else and have them land. Your team cannot eat a bar that they've never seen. They cannot make your judgment calls without your reasoning. They can't read the image in your head. No one can. So before you conclude it's a people problem, ask yourself, did I show them the word? Did I actually transfer the standard, or did I just transfer the task? That question alone will tell you everything. And if you're listening to this and realizing there's a structural reason this keeps happening in your business, it's not just one task, but it's a pattern that you're seeing over and over. That's exactly what the CEO Bottleneck audit is designed to find. We look at where the handoff breaks down specifically in your business, not a generic framework your situation. You can find more details at, uh, CEOamplified CA bottleneck and book your call there. I'll also put the link in the show notes and if you want to build the full system for delegation that actually sticks, the handoff structure, the clarity frameworks, all of it, then delegate like a pro is where you go deep on this together. So I'll put the link for that in the show notes as well. Episode 150. I still can't believe it. Thank you for being here for this one. Thank you for being here for all of them. This show exists because you keep showing up and I don't take a single episode for granted. Thanks again. I'll see you next week. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, I kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me. Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining and we'll catch you on the next episode.