From Micromanagement to Delegation

This is the second of two posts on the subject of leadership and managerial control. In the first post, I focused on micromanagement. Here, I’m focusing on delegation—and how founders can move themselves out of that phase.

For many founders, delegation feels uncomfortable.

Delegation is often thought of as giving something up. You’re handing off responsibility, stepping away from decisions, and allowing someone else to take over a part of the business that you were previously controlling. So it’s not surprising that founders resist it.

But there’s a more useful way to look at it—and this is the only framing that will actually get you to delegate: when you delegate, you are not losing control; you are gaining capability.

The default assumption is often that no one will do it quite the way (or as well as) you would have done it. And that’s true. But different does not mean worse. In many cases, it simply means different—and I have found it more often means better. Of course, this only works if you trust the people you’re working with. It depends on having strong co-workers around you—people you respect, who can think independently and execute at a high level.

There is also a practical reality here. When you first delegate something, you may not get something that meets your standard. That doesn’t mean you take the work back. It means your job now changes. Your role is now to provide constructive feedback and guidance, and to work with the person you’ve delegated to so they understand what you’re looking for. You need to develop trust with your guidance, and help them understand result you want. Delegation, in that sense, is not just handing something off—it’s coaching, guiding, and helping someone to deliver with the quality that you want.

Over time, you’ll end up with multiple capable people contributing their own thinking and approach. Your organization will become more dynamic, and work will get done faster.

And importantly, you begin to remove yourself as the bottleneck—your role changes. You’re now responsible for setting direction, defining standards, and ensuring that the right people are in the right roles.

I find that the hardest part of this transition is psychological. You have to become comfortable with the idea that things will be done differently than you would have done them. But if you never allow for this to happen, you’ll never find out.

The key point is this: delegation is not a subtraction. It’s an addition. You are adding capability, perspective, and speed to the organization. And in most cases, you are giving yourself back time which is the one thing you’re most often running out of!