When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
This episode is part of the Delegation, Bottleneck & Getting Out of the Weeds series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…yes, while we don’t want to burn our team members out, the thought of having to delegate and what all that means is actually scarier for us.”
“They’re really valid reasons, but they’re not about protecting the team from getting overloaded.”
“When something doesn’t fit in that, it’s not you know, oh god, am I overburdening people or not? It’s what fits, what doesn’t, and what do we do with the stuff that’s below the cut line?”
“…when we set that up front, it’s not micromanaging. When we correct later and all the time after, like little nuanced, little correcty things here and there, that’s when it feels like it.”
Episode highlights
The story we tell ourselves about protecting our team
Lia opens with a pattern she spotted in a manager workshop: mid-level and senior leaders claiming they are not delegating because their teams are already buried. The sentiment is admirable, but Lia draws a sharp line. The real reasons people hold on to work are almost never about team capacity. They are about the delegator. Naming that honestly is the first move.
The three real blockers (and why they are not what you think)
Lia unpacks the three reasons managers actually give in the room:
1. Too much context to set. There are eight meetings worth of institutional knowledge needed before anyone else could do this. 2. No time to hand it off properly. The runbook does not exist yet and writing it feels like another project. 3. What if they mess it up? The work is too high-stakes to risk on a newer team member.
None of these are about protecting the team from overload. They are valid, but they belong to the leader, not the team member.
Solving the context problem without drowning anyone
On the “too much context” excuse, Lia pushes back with a simple question: does someone actually need every detail, or just enough to get started? There is a spectrum between zero context and full institutional knowledge, and most handoffs live somewhere in the middle. A team member shadowing a few meetings can often get 80 percent of the way there. And if picking up that work adds six new standing meetings to their calendar, that becomes a load-balancing conversation, not a reason to keep holding on.
Document as you go, not all at once
For the “I do not have time to delegate” problem, Lia offers a practical workaround she used at YouTube: treat documentation as a byproduct of doing the work, not a separate project. Every time you run a recurring meeting or handle a nuanced client situation, jot down the macro steps and who gets what information. When she was running a weekly launch review at YouTube, she spent a few weeks quietly simplifying the process while doing it. By the time she was ready to hand it off, the legwork was already done and the transition took days instead of weeks.
Trust is the real issue when you fear the mess-up
When a leader worries a team member will drop the ball, Lia names it plainly: that is a trust deficit, not a capacity concern. She is quick to add that this is not a character flaw. But the solution is to build trust intentionally rather than indefinitely delay the handoff. That means identifying the two or three specific things you need to see from that person before you feel confident, and then actively creating opportunities to see them. It also means mitigating risk structurally: frequent check-ins set upfront, a checklist, a final review before anything ships. Setting those guardrails at the start is not micromanaging. Correcting constantly after the fact is.
The load-balancing conversation that changes everything
When someone is already stretched and a new project is coming, the instinct is often to either pile it on or say nothing. Lia proposes a third path: a direct conversation that names the new work, acknowledges existing capacity, and works through trade-offs together. Come in with a scoped sense of what the new work actually entails and what success looks like. Frame it as a dialogue. If one of the new projects connects to a goal the team member already cares about, say so. That reframe turns “here is one more thing” into “here is how we figure out what stays and what moves.”
The yes-and of protecting your team
Lia closes by bringing both ideas together. Caring about your team’s bandwidth is a leadership strength. And it is not a reason to stay in the weeds. The real question is whether the hesitation is about the team or about unexamined resistance in yourself. When you examine the actual blockers and apply the right solution to each one, you can hand things off, build ownership on your team, and create space to do the work only you can do.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 233: Why you’re still the point person for everything (and how to fix it). Being stuck as the final decision-maker on everything is almost never a delegation problem. Before delegation can work, three things have to be in place: the right people, clarity on where you as the owner should focus, and simple systems that reduce noise. This episode is most useful for business owners and team leads who have already hired and communicated expectations but are still buried in the weeds.
- Ep 231: Why delegating keeps failing (and the shift that actually fixes it). Delegation fails when leaders dispatch tasks instead of handing off outcomes, keeping themselves as the bottleneck at every step. The fix is shifting from fetch-the-answer assignments to giving a team member ownership of a full result, with clear context, defined success, and agreed checkpoints. This episode is especially useful for leaders who know they should delegate more but still find everything coming back to them.
- Ep 225: How to stop being the bottleneck on every decision your team makes. When your team brings every decision to you for final sign-off, you are doing two jobs at once and your team is never building real ownership. Lia’s fix is to articulate your own decision-making process, then deliberately offload specific decisions with a simple communication system so you stay informed without staying in the weeds. This episode is especially useful for founders and team leads whose capable people are still waiting on them before moving forward.
- Ep 221: Clients keep asking for you by name. How do you hand off work without losing their trust?. When clients insist on working with you personally, the bottleneck is rarely about your team’s ability. It is about two separate problems: your team needs your method translated into real training, and your clients need a clear, confident message that your team delivers the same standard you do. Lia walks through the exact moves to solve both sides, from codifying your secret sauce to publicly edifying your team members in front of clients. This episode is most useful for founders, consultants, agency owners, and service-based business leaders who are stuck as the face of every client relationship.
Want to go deeper?
The Unstoppable Team. How to build a team that runs without you in the room.
Full transcript (click to expand)
The thought of having to delegate and what all that means is actually scarier for us. So we’re sort of saying that it’s because our teams aren’t ready. But there’s actually more going on there. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, most of all stress.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go.
Welcome back to the show. Yesterday, I was running a manager workshop. And whenever I run these, I always get so much good stuff to talk about on the show. And one thing in particular that came up in this workshop, which was for, I would say, mid-level and senior level managers within a large corporate company. The thing that came up for folks was feeling like they are so buried in work, their team members are so buried, and they want to protect them from taking on more.
So that’s why they’re not delegating. And that is why this episode is called, Are You Protecting Your Team or Are You Actually Afraid of Delegating? Because I absolutely love the sentiment of wanting to protect our teams, of not wanting to burn folks out. I love it. I mean, that’s awesome. Like, we want to bring that care and consideration and compassion and all of that to our teams. Absolutely. And who knew there’d be more? And a lot of times, I’ve found that, yes, while we don’t want to burn our team members out, the thought of having to delegate and what all that means is actually scarier for us.
So we’re sort of saying that it’s because our teams aren’t ready. But there’s actually more going on there. And when I talked to managers about this and what I heard in the workshop yesterday, as folks were sharing, a lot of the reasons they weren’t letting go of work were things like, well, there’s just too much context to set. I have to go to eight different meetings to get all the different details in order to be able to connect the dots and know what my team members have to do.
So I wouldn’t be able to offload all of that. Another thing that came up was, well, I just don’t have time to spell everything out to run an effective handoff. I would love to do that. But when am I even going to stop and even figure out what that would be? Another is, well, I have some team members that I’d like to have take on more, but they’re newer, and I don’t know if they’re ready, or what if they mess it up, or this thing is too high stakes.
And I just can’t let go of this one. Now, as you listen to those three things, too much context to set, I don’t have time to delegate, or my team member’s not ready, none of those are actually protecting the team of burning out. They’re not. They’re really valid reasons, but they’re not about protecting the team from getting overloaded. And the reason I want to talk with today is, I want us to tease those two things apart because they have different solutions behind them.
Again, they’re all valid. I’m not saying, oh, this is a BS excuse. No. But that’s about you, not the team member’s readiness. So the first one, too much context to set, is thinking about, you know, well, there are times when a ton of context is needed, and then there’s times when we wish someone had all the institutional knowledge that we had. But if we really thought about it, how much would be okay to go without? Do they need every little detail?
I’m guessing. There’s actually a gradient there. There is, or a spectrum, whatever you want to call it. There’s some context that will be great, but they don’t have to have all of it. And so I think the question to ask ourselves there is, you know, what is the right level of context to set? Could someone shadow me a few meetings, kind of see how these run, something like that, in order to let it go? Because no, they aren’t going to be you.
Now, if business owners are listening to this, they’re never going to have all of the context that you have, right? But I would challenge you to think about, well, is there a little bit of the context that I can set that’s sufficient, right? Not for all situations, but maybe there are some, right? So that’s kind of how we overcome that obstacle. Now, it can turn into overburdening your team if you’re like, well, yeah, they need to take this on, and now they have to take on these eight other meetings every week to be able to go to this.
Then I’d have a conversation with your team about load balancing, right? And then that becomes, okay, this is something that is going to be part of your job to take on now. Let’s look at everything else on. Let’s talk about priorities and trade-offs. And that’s a different conversation. And I think if you framed this new opportunity in terms of a career goal your team member has, or a visibility opportunity, or some kind of leadership potential, something like that, then they’ll be excited about it, right?
And then you also need a load balance. You don’t want to just, you know, whenever we talk about team capacity, it’s a math equation. There’s this many hours in a day, this many days in a week, and how much can we get done in that timeframe? When something doesn’t fit in that, it’s not you know, oh god, am I overburdening people or not? It’s what fits, what doesn’t, and what do we do with the stuff that’s below the cut line?
That’s a very different conversation. A lot of times we have that with a lot of emotion tied to it, a lot of fear. If we think about it like a math equation, it becomes much easier. And I can share how to do this in a one-on-one, or in one of my coaching sessions, whatever it looks like, because I think there can be a lot of resistance around that. But I’ll say the kind of quick, the headline, the bottom line, or whatever, is to have a conversation about capacity and trade-offs.
And then it becomes less emotional, like, oh, I couldn’t handle this, or you know, my team member is not ready, or whatever like that. Now, when we think about our own ability to delegate and to slow down, and we feel like, well, I don’t want to throw this over the fence, but really it’s actually, I don’t have time to be thinking about it. I would challenge you, I talk a lot about delegating, and I have a lot of episodes about it, and setting expectations.
I want to offer you another tool, which is to always be thinking about how can I be documenting things as I go, writing down steps as I go, and optimizing my workflow as I go, so that when the time is right, I can hand something off easily. Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show, with large companies like Google, and also with startups and small businesses, like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas?
Whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty making us all, well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners. I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff, and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at hello at leahgarvin.com, or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company, and let’s make all this team stuff easier, and a lot more fun.
So for example, if you do something on a regular basis, let’s say you run a certain kind of meeting that requires some kind of pulling together logistics, or you have a certain kind of client that, there’s some nuances of how you communicate with them, or you run a kind of, in product teams, there’s a launch review, and you review certain things in a checklist, and certain things have to, emails have to go to different people, or approvals have to be made.
When you’re in that situation, to be writing down like, okay, here’s kind of how I’m handling this, so that again, you are logging things as you go, and you’re not having to explain a million different things if you want to hand it off. For example, back when I was working in YouTube, I was running a launch review, where we had to review designs before they were in the actual product. So we’d look at the different screens, we’d make sure it was working, and then we would file bugs, like if there was issues, we would send the issues to the engineering team, and if we were ready to go, we would approve it.
Now, when I took on that process, it felt very complicated. We had to bring all these different people together, we had to get devices set up, we had to get, you know, we had to write in the bugs, there were things that had to go to different people that we had reviewed again. But what I started to do was, every single week in that meeting, start to write down, okay, what’s actually the macro themes here, what information goes to what person, how can we simplify this, make it easier, so that when it was time to hand that meeting off and have one of my team members run it, it was a very simple and clear process.
It didn’t start that way. It did take a little time to wrangle it and simplify and figure it out. But then when I was ready to hand it off, I had already done that legwork, so it didn’t take like three weeks to hand off this 30-minute meeting. Now, there’s another one, right? We’re saying, what if they mess up? What if my team member can’t cut it? This thing is too important. So I’d say that’s another thing that’s on a spectrum, right?
Like, there are certain things that, yeah, a new team member that’s been there a couple weeks, maybe they shouldn’t take that on, okay? But when we hire people, we should, from day one, maybe even before, start to be building trust with them so that they can take things on independently, right? That is, in most roles, I think that will be the goal, right? So to think about, is this something that, what’s the probability of them messing up?
What are they actually taking on that we could be mitigating with different things like having more frequent check-ins or having a checklist of what they have to do or having a final review before something happens? There are steps that we can take to mitigate risk so the person isn’t just going out on a limb and figuring out themselves. And that’s where setting expectations and having frequent check-ins comes into play, doing that all up front, right? So we’re not micromanaging because when we set that up front, it’s not micromanaging.
When we correct later and all the time after, like little nuanced, little correcty things here and there, that’s when it feels like it. So when we’re worried about someone messing up, that equals a trust thing. You’re not a bad person if you don’t trust your team member right away, but if you think they can’t handle something, you inherently do not trust them to do that thing. So the question, again, is not about, I don’t want to overburden them.
I don’t want to protect them. It’s actually, okay, how can I build trust with this person? How long do I need? What do I need to see them deliver on? What do I need to know to feel confident? What do I need to hear from peers or colleagues to know that, right? Whatever that looks like. And I would say, go through that list in your mind, say, are these things all reasonable? Are all of these required in order to be able to hand this off?
Maybe some of them are and maybe some of them aren’t. And to figure, okay, this is the top three, five things, whatever, that I need to see to be able to trust that person. And let me go do that so that finally when I am getting to a place where, you know, that person can take more on or they’ve been on the team a little longer, I’ve seen some of their work, then I can delegate it.
So I think it is a fantastic, fantastic perspective to not want to overload your team members, to not want to burn them out, to not want to throw work under the fence, to recognize, hey, we’re all spread really thin and I don’t want to be the person that adds one more thing. Love that. It’s a yes and. And there are times when I think we use the framing of, you know, I don’t want to overburden them, when it’s actually some shifts that we could make as leaders to be able to create some space to hand things off.
It’s not an either or. It’s looking at, hey, what are the potential reasons that I’m hesitating letting go of this thing? And one more point on adding things to someone’s plate. This is why expectation setting comes into play so much. Because sometimes we ask a team member to take something on and they say, no, I have so much on my plate, like how am I supposed to do that? No way. And we haven’t set expectations and we haven’t actually scoped what this work would be.
So they think it’s this enormous thing. And maybe we actually think it’s a small thing. And there’s a disconnect. And we’re like, God, well, they’re always saying no. How could I ask them to do one more thing? So I would suggest when you’re going to introduce any additional work, when someone has already at capacity, so to speak, to come in there and say, hey, let’s have a conversation on load balancing. There’s a couple things that are some new, interesting projects.
I’d like to see if they fit. Let’s look at what, you know, overall bandwidth looks like. Let’s look at how to load balance, what’s in, what’s out, how long these things should take for these new projects. I’ll first kind of set some expectations on what works entailed and what success looks like. So you have it. You come in like a dialogue, not forward an email and say, please do this. And then you’re going to have a way better sense of if it’s doable or not.
And so that’s really the framing I would bring is it’s let’s have a conversation about workload. There’s some new stuff coming. I understand you’re at capacity. Let’s figure out how to make it all work. Okay. So then your team member doesn’t feel afraid. They’re not on the defense. They’re not like, oh, here we go again. But they say, oh, and that’s where you can introduce some of those things like, hey, in this one specifically, this connects directly to that goal that you have.
So it feels like we should prioritize this one and maybe deprioritize this set of work. All right. So this is how we discern between am I protecting my team or am I actually just afraid of delegating? And again, it’s not either or, but when we deploy these different strategies and we try to really think critically and actually examine our own resistance, we start to figure out really how to best support our team and how to get ourselves out of the weeds, which is one of the most important things we can do as a leader so that we can scale.
We can grow our team, grow our business, grow our company and get whatever we need to do done. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning into the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it.
See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I know if I'm avoiding delegation or actually protecting my team from burnout?
Ask yourself why you are holding onto the work. If the reasons are things like too much context to set, no time to explain the handoff, or not trusting the team member to get it right, those are about you, not about protecting anyone from overload. Protecting your team from burnout is a real and valid goal. But those three reasons point to shifts you can make as a leader. They are not the same problem, and they have different solutions. Teasing them apart is the first step.
What do I do if I think a team member isn't ready to take on more responsibility?
Feeling like someone is not ready is really a trust issue, and that is okay. The question to ask is what do you need to see from them to feel confident? Make a short list of the top three to five things, then actively work toward those. You can also reduce risk by setting clear expectations up front, scheduling more frequent check-ins, using a checklist, or doing a final review before anything goes out. Setting those guardrails at the start is not micromanaging. Correcting constantly after the fact is.
How do I hand off work without spending weeks explaining all the context?
Start documenting as you go, before a handoff is even on the table. When you run a recurring meeting or handle a specific type of client or project, jot down the steps, who gets what information, and how decisions get made. Over time that becomes a simple process someone else can follow. You do not need to transfer every detail you know. Ask yourself what is the minimum context that is actually sufficient for this task, because there is almost always a gradient, and most tasks do not require all of it.
How do I add work to a team member's plate when they're already at capacity?
Do not forward an email asking them to take something on. Instead, open a conversation about load balancing. Come in and say there are some new projects coming, you understand they are stretched, and you want to figure out together what fits and what does not. Then scope the new work clearly so they know what it actually involves, because a lot of pushback happens when someone assumes a task is huge and you assumed it was small. Frame any new work around their career goals or a visibility opportunity, and then make it a math conversation about trade-offs rather than an emotional one about capacity.
What is the difference between delegating and micromanaging?
The difference is timing. When you set clear expectations, define what success looks like, and schedule check-ins all at the beginning, that is effective delegation. It gives the team member structure without hovering. Micromanaging happens when you skip that setup and then jump in with small corrections constantly throughout the work. If you are worried someone will mess something up, front-load the guardrails so they are not figuring it out alone, and then give them room to run.