SMME #491 Why Delegation Fails: Handoff, Ownership, and the Fix

Speaker A: Well, hello, my dears. Daniela here, and welcome to Spa Marketing Made Easy. Today we are talking about something that every single spa owner has experienced at least once, and most of us have experienced more times than we would like to admit. We're talking about why delegation fails, not why your team fails, not why you fail, but why delegation as a system fail, fails, and what you can do about it the next time you hand something off so that it actually stays handed off. Now, this episode is a part of our July theme of freedom and delegation. And, um, I want to start with something that I think is really important to understand. Okay? So delegation, similar to leadership, is a skill. It's something that you can learn. It's something that you can improve upon. Okay? It's not something that you, like, have a gift for or you don't. It's a skill. It's a system. And every skill and system you have in your business can be improved upon and can get better and better and better. When you understand it in a deeper way, if you understand what's actually breaking it, right, you can fix that thing. So let's talk about what breaks delegation. Now, there's two specific places where I consistently see delegation breaking down. The first is the handoff itself. All right? So actually giving something to your spa manager, giving something to your staff, whatever that looks like for you, that's one place where we see a lot of things breaking. The second is in the ongoing management of that item, um, or task that was handed off. Right? We're going to walk through both. They both have very different fixes. But in order for either of those fixes to work, the one kind of universal thing is that your team has to understand the big picture, not just the task or the deadline, but they've got to understand the why behind the task. What does it connect to? Uh, what breaks downstream is if this one particular thing doesn't happen. Okay? So it's gotta be, like, the entire ecosystem. Now I have a story I wanna share with you. This, um, was such a crazy, crazy moment. Uh, it was Christmas Eve Eve. I don't even know if that's the day, but the day before Christmas eve. Okay. In 2025. And, you know, it's always, like, such a busy time. It's end of year, school's getting out, you're getting ready for, you know, Christmas, if that's a holiday that you celebrate. And Taya and I were like, okay, we are ready. We're gonna have a mama date. She had just taken a relaxing bubble bath. We got in Our jammies. We were getting all settled in on the couch for just like a mom, uh, and daughter date night. Taya is, like, obsessed with baking. And so we were gonna watch the Junior baking show. I don't know if you guys have ever watched that, but it's awesome. And. And we sat down on the couch, we were kind of snuggling, and all of a sudden there was literally this stream of water coming down from the ceiling. It was dripping onto my coffee table. And I was like, oh, my God, we gotta call daddy right now. So I called Kyle. He obviously, he came right home. And, uh, the moment he walked in, Kyle just started, like, ripping apart the ceiling, right? He had to find where the leak was coming from. And the thing is, with plumbing, it's. You think you found the problem, but then it, like, connects to something else, and that connects to something else. And then suddenly you're looking at this whole, like, cascading system of issues that you didn't even know existed. We ended up like, thank God my neighbor is a plumber. But we ended up having to get an entire new water heater. And we had something, um, wrong with our actual bathtub, like, shower sprayer thing. So two totally separate problems. Um, and Christmas Eve Eve, right? Um, but what became very clear is that you cannot fix a plumbing problem if you only, only understand the one spot that the water was coming out, right? You have to understand the entire system. How everything connects, where the pressure lives, what feeds what. Because fixing one thing without understanding the whole thing means you're going to be ripping the ceiling out again in six months. Delegation works in exactly the same way. Now, most spa owners are just going to hand their team the leak. Here's the task, right? Here's the deadline. Go. And the team member doesn't understand how everything connects. All right? They. They do exactly what they're told to do, right? Because that's what they were given. But they don't know what's upstream, they don't know what's downstream, they don't know what breaks if this one piece doesn't happen correctly. And so when something goes sideways, when a client doesn't get the follow up they need, or a post goes out wrong, or a document isn't gathered before a call, the instinct is to blame the execution, but the execution was fine. The problem was the person executing didn't understand the full system that they were working inside. So when your team understands the big picture, the individual task, they start to make sense in a way that they just simply couldn't have if you didn't have the checklist. Okay, so before we get into the mechanics of a good handoff, I want you to ask yourself, does my team actually understand what we're trying to build? Have I shown them the full system or have I just like, pointed to the leak? Right. Do I just showing them the water coming down from the ceiling without understanding how everything connects? Okay, so now let's get into the handoff itself, because even if your team understands the very big picture, the handoffs can still break down, and it usually breaks down in a very specific way. So if you have been a longtime listener, you know that 2025 was a like the year of the Phoenix. For us, it was this year of reinvention, this year of, um, transformation. And it's funny, 2025, because five is a number of transformation, if you're into numerology. But for us, uh, we had completely shut down the previous version of growth factor to rebuild it around AI to make the AI integration the core of what we deliver, which is what we're doing now so often is building AI employees for spa owners to help them streamline their operations, to help them build more profitable spas. So AI is not just an add on or not just an afterthought, but the central, one of the central features of the program. Okay, well, because of that and because we are using so much AI in our day to day operation, that meant every day everybody is doing a new SOP. And it, you know, now we're in 2026 and still every day everybody is doing a new SOP. Because every AI transitions and changes so fast. Especially in the past, like three months, guys, it is like light speed out there at how fast things are advancing. So we were Talking about new SOPs, new processes, new workflows, new ways of doing things that we had been already doing for a decade, right? We completely changed the way that we produce this podcast. And we're now almost on our 500th episode. You know, I mean, like, we were running this thing like a well oiled machine, and now we completely changed the way that we were doing things. So all of a sudden we started making silly mistakes, we started missing things. Um, and the thing was, it wasn't just one department. It was in marketing, it was in operations, it was in fulfillment. But they all could be traced back to the same root cause. And that was we were not living and breathing in Monday.com, which is our operational hub.

Speaker B: Huh?

Speaker A: Okay, and here's the deal, guys. It's not that we were like just trying to be sloppy and not following the rules. It was that our processes, because we had been doing this for so long, they were so embedded, so automatic over the years that it was sort of like riding a bike for us. We knew what we were doing. But then we changed everything. We changed and we added these steps that were actually really important, um, to the process. And because the process was kind of shifting underneath us, we were still operating as if the old system was in place. And so we were missing things. And the solution was making sure that we were going back to the board. We had to go back to the board and understand the new order of operations. We had to verify that these steps, um, were being completed. And it was hard for me because I was like, when I was still trying to figure out what was going on, I was like, this is something that happens in year one or two, not like year 12. Um, but again, what I learned through that process is that the system only works when everyone is actively using the system. Okay, I want to say that again because one, uh, of the issues that I have seen with our spa owners is, yeah, I've got the system for it, I've got the policy for it, I've got the Monday board for it, but nobody's using it. Nobody's enforcing the policy, Nobody's checking the SOPs, nobody's using the Monday board. And so if you're not doing those things, of course the system's going to break. Okay? So it's really important that you don't assume the system is running without checking the system. Right. You've got to have these checks and balances for a reason. Now, since we've recommitted, and I say recommitted right to Monday as the non negotiable central hub of operations, the level of friction across our team has dropped dramatically. So every task lives there, every deadline lives there. Every single person knows where to look and when something isn't happening. I can see it without having to chase everybody down. Okay? So if you, if you have a project management system, I highly recommend Monday. Com. There's a whole bunch that are out there, but make sure that your team is actually using it in the day to day. Okay, that is super important. Now let's talk about something that oftentimes gets overlooked. And when we're kind of going through or implementing the system, we're changing things.

Speaker B: How.

Speaker A: And that's actually how your team communicates and how your team processes information. So something that I learned about myself, um, after years and Years of coaching, and it became pretty apparent when I started doing group coaching calls was that I am very much a verbal processor. I need to hear things. So oftentimes when we're doing a group coaching call, people are typing these really long comments into the chat and, and I just have. I just. Can you please unmute? Can you please unmute m and tell me? Because I'm going to understand in such a better way. I learned that about myself that I am a verbal processor. But some people need to hear things. Some people need to see things written, some people need to actually do them, do the things themselves, right? So it's really important when, like, communicating something new to my team, I've had to build my style or, uh, build the style in all of the manners, right? Because we all communicate and understand differently. We typically will have a video, we will have written instructions. We'll have, depending on the complexity of what we're doing, we'll have, uh, an SOP of the overview of the entire system. We just got through doing this with our marketing processes because we, I mean, look, guys, we do a magazine every month, we do a podcast episode every Monday. We do a blog post every Tuesday. We're sending out emails to our entire list to our clients. There's a lot of communication, a lot of content, uh, that's not even talking about social media content that's going out on a variety of platforms. So when we completely changed the system that we had become very, uh, well versed in doing, we had to make sure that everybody understood the bigger picture. And then we had those written and verbal instructions and had the opportunity to discuss it at a meeting. Okay. Now, understanding for your own business how each person on your team processes information is the difference between delegation that's actually going to hold and actually going to stick versus you passing something off. And then it's back on your desk in two weeks because a hundred things have gone wrong. So when I am, um, doing something new, I always have a video. I always have written instructions. Okay. So not just one, but both. The loom is really helpful for the verbal processors, um, super, super important. And then the written instructions. And now I'm just going to throw in there with AI. Um, my team has a coach, Daniela GPT, that has a ton of information of how I would be asking things. There's also an onboarding GPT that has information around our company that can be asked. So there's lots of ways that we can, you know, incorporate, incorporate the information in a way that your team is going to Understand it. Now, another thing that I do, and I learned this from Annie. Annie is a dear friend of mine. She used to run our company, and then she had a baby and,

Speaker B: um,

Speaker A: went fully into mom mode. Uh, but one thing that she used to do all the time was the repeat back. So if I would give her instructions, she would always repeat them back to me so that, uh, it was clear that she understood exactly what I needed. I do this with my kids all the time. I'll say, luca, do you understand what Mama, tell me what I just asked you to do? If I'm giving him, like, multi steps, and then he will repeat it back, it's really an effective, like, communication tool. And it just makes sure that we both kind of heard and understood the same thing. Okay, so when delegation fails. I know that sounds like a lot, but when delegation fails, it's almost always because we gave instructions in a really hurried way without fully communicating and without confirming that the other person fully understood the scope of what we were asking. We assumed. Okay. And assumptions. Like, my dad used to have this saying. I'm not going to say it on here, but it's, uh, when you assume, you make an ass out of U M E. That was like his little saying. And, and so it was, uh, that stuck with me. That's something that I remember for a long time. But it's like, okay, well, let's not. Let's not do that. Okay, so let's talk about when we are kind of moving the distinctions between building a business that runs without you. That's the goal, right? We want to remove the owner dependency in a business. This is why, by the way, I talk so much about, like, getting out of the room. It's not because I, like, am, um, anti being in the treatment room. I think being in the treatment room is amazing. That's what got us into this in the first place. But I very much am against owner dependency. And I think that, uh, every business should be built as if you were going to sell it. And in order to sell it, you have to remove the owner dependency. So that means that the company should be able to hit its financial goals without you as the primary revenue generator. Okay, so we build the company, we systemize the company, we clean up the operations so that you can hit those financial goals. And then if being in the room gives you joy, if it makes you happy, then go for it. And that can just be the icing on the cake. But there's so much work to be done around operations. What the CEO is actually doing And I feel like that kind of level of awareness doesn't happen until you're actually out of the room and then you can see it, right? Like, you can't see the forest through the trees. When you're in the treatment room and doing the day to day, you're in that, like, employee mode, you're in that provider mode. And, um, it's hard to understand the bigger picture. Well, what is going to help you to move, to get into that place where you can step out of the treatment room, where you can step into the role of CEO, is understanding how to delegate effectively. All right? So when you assign a task, you're still responsible for the outcome, right? If you are delegating that task, you still have ownership. You're handing someone the work, but you're holding the accountability. Okay? So every time something goes slightly wrong or a decision needs to be made, or a circumstance comes up that wasn't in the original instructions, it comes back to you. You're still the last in line. Now, here's the next step. When you delegate ownership, then your team member is responsible for the outcome. And this might come in stages, right? Like, you first might delegate something, and you still have ownership. But if you're getting to a point where you have a spa manager, you have someone that is in leadership, you delegate that ownership, and that person is responsible for the outcome. They have the authority to make decisions within that scope. They don't need to check in with you every, uh, time something comes up because you've given them both the responsibility and the authority to handle it. Okay? Okay. So let's say you have a lead esthetician on your team. You could assign her task, like, schedule a training this month, check the sanitation of the treatment rooms every Friday. Or you could give her ownership. And ownership sounds like this. You are responsible for identifying the training gaps in our clinical team and coordinating quarterly trainings with our reps. You decide who needs what. You organize the reps coming in. You run the training. I want to know what's happening, and I want to know your team is growing. The rest is yours. The second version doesn't just hand our work, it hands our domain. Right? And when someone owns a domain, they're going to show up in a completely different way than when they're completing the task. When we would go through our spa manager certification, one of the most interesting things is that there was this disconnect between the CEOs and the spa managers, and the CEOs wanted their spa managers to take ownership, to step up to do more. But the spa managers didn't realize that they even had the authority. They didn't feel that they had the authority. And so this is primarily like a communication gap in what is expected. This is something that can be solved by. With proper delegation and letting them know, do I have ownership of this, or is this tasks that I'm still bringing back to you? Okay, so, uh, Christie, in our business, Christie owns events. Okay. And, like, fully delegated ownership of every logistical detail of our events. Decor, vendors, venue. I mean, we talk about it. It's not like I'm not, like, communicating with her about it. I'm involved in it. But they, like, there is so much ownership that she has over what we're doing, where we're doing it. And it makes my life infinitely easier because these events, they have anywhere between, like, 30 to 70 people, depending on the venue. And she is so good at that. She is so good with details. She's a super phenomenal organizer. She does it a billion times better than I ever could on my best day. So, you know, I'll always check in with her. Actually, a few years ago, um, I was asking everybody on the team actually kind of, like, what their bucket list items were, and Christie wanted to travel more. That was one of the things. So I asked her to make a list of all the different places she wanted to travel to, and that, like, very quickly became our event list of, like, the cities that we were going to have events in, because we wanted to, like, combine work and play.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: So it was really, really fun. Um, but this year, we had an event in D.C. and my mom was in town, and she. She actually was here for, like, two months. She attended the event with us. And my mom got here, and she was, like, asking me a million questions about the event. When does it start? What are we doing for dinner? Where is this happening? What? I was like, I literally have no idea. I, uh. My funny saying is I just work here.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: And that is one of the most freeing feelings. Like, yes, of course I know that I'm showing up and I am, you know, creating the content of what we're teaching. I do all of that. But the logistics of who, what, when, where, why, how. Um, Cristy fully, fully owns that. And I saw it so clearly when my mom was asking me all these questions, and I was like, look, you just have to ask Christy, because I literally have no idea. So I just show up and speak, and it was such a good feeling. And that only works because Christy doesn't just have the Task. She has the domain, she has the authority, and she has my full trust to make decisions without running every single thing by me first. Okay? So I want you to think about one area in your business, just one where you could stop assigning and start delegating ownership. Pick a person who's ready for it, define that domain clearly, give them the authority and get out of the way. Okay? Now, I had talked about AI a little bit. I want to talk about AI a little bit more because I think everything I just described about human delegation also applies directly to your AI tools. And the failure mode is also identical. So when content doesn't sound like you or when you get output from a GPT, it's a little off, a little generic, a little like it could have come from any spa in the entire country. The instinct is to edit it, post it and move on, right? I get that you get an output in out of Quad or ChatGPT, you get it in a Google Doc, you edit it and then you post it, right? You're busy. The edit was quick, it's good enough. Here's the thing that you're missing. The edit that you just made is training data. And if you don't feed that back to the GPT, you're going to make the same edit next month and the month after that and the month after that until you get so frustrated and so annoyed that AI just doesn't work for your voice, right? So the GPTs that we build inside of Growth factor implementation, they're not set it and forget it, right? None of them are. They are living tools. They are employees in your business, we call them AI employees in your business. They get smarter every time that you use them, but only if you close the loop when you edit the output and you put that back in and you say, here's what I changed, here's why. Please take note and store this to your memory. This is how the tool learned your voice. This is how the tool learns what you like and what you don't like, right? That's how the, the output gets more accurate every single time so that you're barely editing them at all. Now, uh, most people at this stage of AI integration, they're building the GPT and then treating it like a vending machine, right? Put in a prompt, take out a post, walk away, and that is what produces the output that stays generic because the tool never had a chance to learn, right? The tool, Claude or ChatGPT, whatever you're using, it's not broken, it's just waiting for Feedback that never came. So it's going to keep doing what it's doing without that feedback. So think about it this way. When you hire a new team member, you don't onboard them once and then never give them feedback again. You're developing them, um, okay, you are developing them over time. You're giving a, uh, debrief after client interactions. You course correct when something is off and over time they get better because you invested in their development consistently. Our AI employees work the same way. They require feedback, the same commitment to iteration after iteration after iteration. The only difference is the AI, uh, employees never get tired. They never have a bad day. They never need a difficult performance review conversation. But they do need you to close the loop every single time. So if you have a content GPT or a marketing tool or any AI system that's producing an output that you are editing before it goes out, start feeding those edits back. Start treating the refinement as part of the process, not as evidence that the tool isn't working. The tool is working. It's just learning. And it will keep learning faster than any human you could train as long as you give it what it needs to grow. All right, so let's bring this all together because I want you to leave this episode with a framework that you can actually use. Delegation fails for two reasons. The handoff was unclear or the system was not maintained after the handoff. Every delegation failure I have ever seen, whether it's in my own company across decade of working with spot owners, with human members, with AI employees, it traces back to one of those two things. And underneath both of them is the same route. We move too fast, we assume too much, we stop checking in. So I want you to do one thing this month. Pick one thing that you've tried to delegate and take it back, just one, and ask yourself, honestly, why did it fail? What? Was the handoff unclear? Did you give instructions in a hurried way without confirming that they were understood? Did your team member know the task but not the why? The picture of what you were building, right, and why their piece mattered? Did you skip the repeat back and assume that alignment wasn't actually there? Or did the system break down after the handoff? Did you build it, hand it off, and then stop maintaining? Did you stop checking Monday.com like we did? Did you stop giving feedback on the outfit, did you? Or on the output? Did you stop developing the person human or your AI tool? Your AI employee? Did you stop giving them feedback? Okay, once you know which failure you're dealing with, Then the fix becomes clear. So for an unclear handoff, go back to the big picture. First, show your team the tool, the outcome, the client experience. Then communicate with LOOM and written documents. Okay? Then use the repeat back. Make sure that every task lives in Monday.com where everyone can see it. Now, by the way, your AI employees can create a very detailed SOP from a LOOM video. It can also create your Monday Boards in general. So much of what we're revamping, we're using Claude to recreate our Monday boards in the process. That makes the most sense, that saves so much time. Okay, now, for a system that wasn't maintained, schedule the maintenance, put the feedback loop on the calendar, develop your team members, or again, your AI employees with the same consistency that you'd want them to bring in their work. And for those of you who are ready to stop assigning tasks and start delegating ownership, this is like, uh, the level above, right? Pick one domain, pick one person, give them the full scope and authority, and practice getting out of the way. It's going to feel uncomfortable, right? They're going to mess up at something, right? But is it a little mess up that they can learn and grow from? Um, that discomfort you're feeling is the feeling of your business growing, of your business expanding. Okay. Freedom is not built in a single delegation. It's built in a series of delegations that are set up correctly, handed off, clearly owned, free, fully, and maintained over time until the system runs without you. That is the work, and I promise you, it is worth doing. Okay, my dears, that is it. This is your episode for today. I am, um, so excited for you to please take this, do something with it. Don't just listen, take action. Apply these concepts to your business. It will make such a big difference. And if today's episode resonated with you, please take 30 seconds. Leave us a review on Apple Podcast. The more spot owners that find this show, the more that we can help. And that means everything to me and my team. All right, thank you so much and I will catch you in the next episode.

Speaker B: Quick reminder before you leave. If your spa growth still depends on you doing more, it's time for a shift. Watch the System Shift, a free training designed to help spa owners break past that 25 to $35,000 month plateau without adding more treatment hours. You'll learn the CEO level systems that help you scale while protecting your time, your values, and your piece. Go to grow autoesthetics.com podcast and watch the systems shift. That's grow.autoesthetics.com podcast.