Delegate, Elevate, and Stop Being the Answer

Last month, we compared building a productive organization to playing basketball. When you are still figuring out what works, you are shooting from the field. You have to read the defense, adjust, and find the right opening. Once you know what works, you are shooting free throws. The goal is to repeat a proven process with discipline and consistency.

But there is another challenge. You cannot be the only person taking every shot. If the leader remains involved in every decision, approval, and problem, the organization may become more consistent, but it will never truly scale.

Why Leaders Keep Solving Everything

Most leaders do not hold onto work because they want to hurt the organization. They do it because solving the problem themselves feels faster. They know the history. They know the customer. They know how the process works. They can often make the decision in a few minutes instead of spending twenty minutes helping someone else work through it. There is also a more personal reason. Being the person with the answer can make a leader feel smart, useful, and necessary. That may feel good in the moment, but it creates a long-term problem. Every time the leader jumps in and solves the issue, the team learns to bring the next issue back to the leader. The leader becomes busier. The team becomes more dependent. The organization reaches a ceiling.

Jim Collins described this in Good to Great as the “genius with a thousand helpers” model. The leader may genuinely be brilliant, but everyone else becomes responsible for helping execute that leader’s answers. The organization has not built a leadership team. It has become dependent on one person. That model can produce results for a while. But it does not scale, and it becomes especially fragile when the genius is unavailable, makes the wrong call, or eventually leaves.

Your Job Is Not to Have Every Answer

A leader’s job is not to be the smartest person in every conversation. It is to build people who can think, decide, and act without needing the leader in the room. That requires a different response when someone brings you a problem.

Instead of immediately giving the answer, ask questions:

• What do you think is really causing the issue?
• What options have you considered?
• What would you do if I were not available?
• Is that decision consistent with our Core Values?
• Does it support our Vision?
• Does it follow our Core Processes?

The goal is not to make the conversation longer. The goal is to help the person develop judgment. When leaders continually teach the “why” instead of only giving the “what,” people become more capable of making good decisions on their own.

The conversation then evolves to “Here is what I think we should do, and here is why.” That is real development.

Keep the Monkey Where It Belongs

In The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr., and Hal Burrows describe what happens when an employee brings a problem to a manager and the manager accepts responsibility for the next step.

The “monkey” moves from the employee’s back to the manager’s back. Leaders do this all the time without realizing it. Someone says, “We have a problem with this customer.” The leader responds, “Let me look into it.” The employee walks away relieved. The leader walks away with another monkey. Do that often enough and the leader becomes overloaded while the team becomes increasingly dependent. The leader may believe they are being helpful, but they are also teaching people that bringing the problem upward is easier than thinking it through themselves.

A practical leadership tool I use and teach is commonly called the 1-3-1 Rule.

When someone brings an issue to a leader, they should bring:

• One clearly defined issue
• Three possible solutions
• One recommendation they would choose if the leader were not available

The 1-3-1 Rule helps keep the monkey with the person who owns the issue. Instead of taking the problem back, the leader can ask questions, challenge the thinking, and coach the recommendation. The employee keeps ownership while developing better judgment.

Over time, the conversation changes from:

“What should I do?”

to:

“Here is what I think we should do, and here is why.”

That is the goal. The leader is no longer collecting problems. The leader is developing people who can solve them.

Delegate and Elevate®

The EOS® tool that helps leaders address this directly is Delegate and Elevate®. The exercise asks you to evaluate your work based on two questions:

• Are you good at it?
• Do you enjoy doing it?

That creates four categories:

• You love it and are great at it.
• You like it and are good at it.
• You do not like it but are good at it.
• You do not like it and are not good at it.

The goal is to spend more time doing the work you love and are great at while delegating work that belongs somewhere else in the organization. The most difficult category for many leaders is the work they are good at but do not enjoy. They have probably done it for years. Others may assume it still belongs to them. Because they can do it well, they continue to carry it. But being capable of doing something does not mean you should continue doing it.

The better question is:

Does this work require me, or have I simply never allowed anyone else to own it?

Delegation Is More Than Moving Tasks

Delegation is often treated like a time-management exercise. It is bigger than that. When a leader holds onto work, decisions, and approvals that should belong to someone else, the leader is not only losing time. The leader may also be preventing another person from growing. People move from apprentice to journeyman by observing, discussing, and eventually doing the work themselves. They need room to make decisions. They need the opportunity to use judgment. They may even need the freedom to make a reasonable mistake and learn from it. A leader who always steps in first removes that opportunity. Sometimes leaders believe they are protecting the team. In reality, they may be quietly communicating, “I do not trust you to handle this.”

Let the Team Step Into the Space

Delegation does not mean dropping work on someone and walking away. The right person must have the ability, capacity, clarity, and authority to own it. That may require training. It may require clearer processes. It may require the leader to explain the expected outcome and the boundaries around the decision. But eventually, the leader has to let go. There will be moments when the other person handles the work differently. That does not automatically mean they are doing it incorrectly. The standard cannot always be, “Did they do it exactly the way I would have done it?”

The better questions are:

• Did they achieve the right outcome?
• Did they act consistently with our Core Values?
• Did they follow our Core Processes?
• Did they learn something that will help them make the next decision better?

That is how trust and capability grow.

Scaling Requires More Than One Capable Person

Getting the right people doing the right work is what turns individual discipline into organizational consistency. The boring, repeatable work should not depend on one person’s memory, effort, or heroics. It should be owned by capable people throughout the organization. Delegate and Elevate® is not simply about creating a lighter schedule for the leader. It is about creating an organization that can execute without every decision flowing through one person. The leader who answers every question may feel valuable. The leader who builds people capable of answering those questions creates something far more valuable. Your goal is not to become better at carrying the organization. Your goal is to build an organization that no longer requires you to carry it.