You Can’t Do It All Yourself

There’s a version of leadership that keeps too much.

Too many decisions. Too much control. Too little delegation. The belief — sometimes conscious, often not — that the best way to ensure things are done right is to do them yourself. Or at least to supervise them so closely that the staff member might as well not exist.

That version of leadership is exhausting for the leader, demoralizing for the staff, and ultimately less effective than the alternative.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Jethro is watching Moses handle every decision for an entire nation by himself, and his assessment is blunt: what you are doing is not good. It’s not good for Moses. It’s not good for the people. The load is too heavy and he cannot handle it alone.

The solution Jethro proposes is delegation with trust. Identify capable people. Assign them real responsibility. Handle only what genuinely requires your specific authority. Let the system work.

Coaches who can’t delegate effectively are usually operating from one of a few assumptions. Either they don’t fully trust their staff’s judgment. Or they believe the work reflects on them so personally that they can’t release control of it. Or they simply haven’t invested enough in developing their staff to a point where delegation is comfortable.

All three of those are addressable. Trust is built through specific experience — small delegations that demonstrate capability, followed by larger ones. The reflection problem is solved by changing the metric from “did I do this right” to “did the team do this right.” And staff development is a discipline that pays dividends in direct proportion to the investment made in it.

You cannot handle it alone. That’s not a weakness. It’s a design feature of the system. Build the staff. Trust the staff. Let the staff lead.

Honest self-assessment of delegation habits. The difference between a real reason and a control preference is important.