Home / The Playbook / The First 90 Days / Delegate One Real Thing
Day 90 · Move 08

Delegate one thing you're tempted to keep doing yourself.

The instinct to stay hands-on with the work you're personally good at is common in a first management role, and it's costly. Hand off one real thing, deliberately, before day 90.

Staying close to your old work feels safe, it's the thing you know you're good at, and letting go of it feels like giving up your only proof of competence. But every hour spent doing your old job is an hour not spent doing the new one, and your team notices which one you're actually showing up for.

Real delegation has three parts: clarity, capability, and then trust. Skip clarity and they guess at what you actually wanted. Skip capability and you've set them up to fail. Skip trust, hovering, re-checking, quietly redoing their work, and you've delegated the task but kept the anxiety. Half-trust is worse than no trust: it gives them the responsibility without the room to actually carry it.

Pick something real, not a token task
Delegating something trivial to prove you "can" delegate doesn't count. Hand off something that actually mattered to you keeping.
Say why you're handing it off, not just that you are
"I want you to own this because I trust your judgment on it" lands very differently than a task quietly disappearing from your plate.
Let the first version be worse than yours would have been
If you rescue it the moment it's not done your way, you've delegated the task but not the ownership. Resist that unless something is actually at risk.
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