I want to tell you about the most expensive sentence in my vocabulary for the first few years of Gym Launch: “ItS FaStEr If I JuSt Do It MySeLf.”

FML!!!! If I hear that now, I want to rip my hair out, literally lol.

And the annoying part is, it was TRUE. I WAS faster. I could write the email in 10 minutes that would take someone on my team an hour. I could review a vendor agreement in one pass. I could handle the upset customer without a script because I'd done it 500,000x.

So I kept doing all of it. And I told myself I was being efficient and setting a great example (but there is a point of diminishing return)

Then one week I got SUPER sick, actually sick, out for four days with the flu, and I watched what happened.

Things didn't just slow down. They stopped. Not because my team wasn't capable, but because I had never let them make the ATTEMPTS needed to be capable.

I had been so busy being fast that I built a team that could only move at the speed of ME.

That's when it clicked: "it's faster if I do it myself" isn't a reason to keep a task. It's the signal that it's OVERDUE to be handed off.

Here's the reframe I want to give you: every task you've already mastered is worth more to your team than it is to you.

When you do it, the company gets the task done. When THEY do it, the company gets the task done AND a more capable person. You're choosing between output and output-plus-growth, and most managers unknowingly choose the smaller one every single day because it feels productive.

The math most people never do: yes, it takes you 10 minutes and takes them an hour. But you're going to do that task 50 more times this year 😛

Spend the hour teaching it ONCE, and you buy back 50 tasks (math).

Keep it, and you'll still own it next year, plus everything else you've hoarded by then. That's how leaders become bottlenecks, one "it's faster if I do it" at a time.  If you got burned delegating once and pulled everything back, your current team is paying for someone else's mistake.

So how do you delegate without dropping the ball? Three rules:

1. Delegate the outcome, not just the steps. Tell them what good looks like and let them own the how. If you hand someone a checklist, you've delegated your hands, not your thinking - this is good for new people or under-skilled people. If you do this, they learn nothing, and you still own the result.

2. Match your check-ins to their experience with THAT task, not their experience overall. Your most senior person doing something brand new needs more touchpoints. Your junior person doing something they've done 30 times needs you to get out of the way. Micromanaging a vet and abandoning a rookie are the same mistake in opposite directions.  🙂

3. Budget for the 80% version. The first time they do it, it will be worse than yours. That is not delegation failing; that's the price you pay! You pay it once. The alternative is you pay full price forever. 

The leaders who scale are not the ones who do the most. They're the ones who are constantly working themselves out of their current job by properly following the leadership flywheel.

So here's the question for this week: what's one thing on your plate right now that someone on your team could do at 80%, and what's actually stopping you from handing it to them?

— Leila

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