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
“Reframing is my jam because when we take a look at a perspective or a belief or something that’s keeping us stuck, and we shift that perspective just a little bit, we start to see all the possibilities that sort of are revealed to us.”
“…there is nothing more expensive than high turnover because we spend so much time looking for candidates, recruiting, interviewing, ramping people up, really helping people be set up for success.”
“She offloaded all of those tasks to folks that were really better suited to do that anyway, saved about three or four hours right out of the gate that she could now use doing PR for her high profile clients that she was charging a thousand dollars an hour for.”
“We’re the visionary. We’re the idea person. We’re really moving that ship forward. We’re driving the strategy, but we don’t have to be involved in every single thing.”
Episode highlights
The three mindset blocks keeping you stuck on delegation
Most owners and leaders are not opposed to delegation in theory. In practice, three beliefs get in the way. First, guilt: you have mentally sorted your low-value tasks into a pile and handing that pile to a team member feels unfair. Second, confidence in your own speed: you are genuinely fast at certain tasks and you assume no one else can match that pace or quality. Third, doubt about your team’s readiness: you are not against delegating, you just do not think your team is set up to handle it yet without creating more work for you.
Lia is direct that the third bucket is where most people actually land, and the fix is simpler than it sounds: set clear expectations. Paint the picture of what success looks like and leave room for the team member to bring their own approach to it. A handful of past episodes on the show go deeper on this, and they are linked in the show notes.
What not delegating is actually costing you
Not delegating is not a neutral choice. Lia lays out three real costs:
Time and revenue. If you are a service provider, coach, or consultant billing at a high hourly rate, every hour you spend on folder structures, social media copy, or hashtags is revenue you left on the table. One client who runs a PR firm offloaded writing templates and social media editing and reclaimed three to four hours a week. She was billing $1,000 an hour for PR work. That shift was worth roughly $4,000 a week, immediately.
Team morale and retention. When you hold everything close, team members read it as a signal that you do not trust them. Some were hired expecting autonomy and growth. When they do not get it, they leave. Turnover is expensive: recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, ramping up. If a team member exits because they felt disempowered, you restart that entire cycle. Worse, your intention was often the opposite. You were trying to spare them from tedious work, and they interpreted it as you not believing they were capable.
Your own stress. The to-do list never ends. You are the bottleneck and you know it, but you cannot see the way out. This is the combination cost of all the others.
What the other side actually looks like
When delegation is working, the stress relief alone is hard to put a price on. You have a clear mental framework: this type of task is mine, this type goes to the team, this type gets outsourced, this type goes on the backlog. New work lands in your inbox and you route it without agonizing over it.
Beyond your own clarity, trust compounds. Lia shares a real example from a conversation she had the morning she recorded this episode. A manager had a team member who kept bringing up her interest in analytical thinking and data. The manager held onto a task until she realized it was a perfect match for that team member’s strengths, then handed it off explicitly because of those strengths. The team member was not just handed work, she was told her skill set was valued and had been actively sought out for this opportunity. The trust that creates is not something you can manufacture any other way.
The reframe that makes delegation feel different
Lia’s core reframe is this: delegation does not take away your control. It elevates your business.
The old belief is that handing things off means losing grip. The reframe is that handing things off creates a bench of leaders, frees you for income-producing work, and removes you as the source of slowdown. The team is not waiting on you for every decision. You are not wondering how much of the business has stalled because you did not check email for an hour.
She closes with the familiar line: if you want to go faster, go alone. If you want to go further, go together. Scaling requires bringing people in. Bringing people in requires letting go. The first move is just dropping the belief that delegation is something to avoid.
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)
And this is one of the biggest pain points business owners have shared with me is like, I want to scale myself. I want to be doing more income producing activity. I want to be able to empower my team. I just don’t know where to start. And that’s why this is one of the six areas we dive into with the Ops Playbook, is we figure out, okay, what are those places that you absolutely have to be involved in?
What are all the rest of those? And what are the steps we need to do to take to get there? Welcome to the Managing Made Simple Podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and 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, or a new manager looking to learn 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. Let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that has been coming up again and again and again with my clients working through the Ops Playbook, especially folks that have managers on their teams, which is the topic of delegating.
And so today, I’m not going to talk about strategies for how to delegate because that’s something that I’ve actually talked about quite a bit on the show. I want to talk about where we get stuck when it comes to delegating. And if you know anything about me, I’m all about reframing places where people get stuck. Before I created this podcast, I wrote the book Unstuck, Reframe Your Thinking to Free Yourself from the Patterns and People That Hold You Back.
Spoiler alert, some of these people are you. And this is all about reframing. Reframing is my jam because when we take a look at a perspective or a belief or something that’s keeping us stuck, and we shift that perspective just a little bit, we start to see all the possibilities that sort of are revealed to us. And that’s what I want us to do with delegating today. Because oftentimes, as business owners, as team leaders, we have this perspective that delegating means micromanaging, means telling people what to do, means throwing stuff over the fence.
Whatever our belief is, it prevents us from delegating. And then as a result, we have way more things on our plates than we have to. We’re way too far in the weeds. We’re making every little decision. And that is costing us so much time and money in our business. And I have found that for business owners and managers within teams that start really getting good at delegating, they can save themselves literally hours, hours and hours every single week automatically, right out of the gate, like the minute we’re done creating the opposite playbook.
It’s instant savings. Okay, so to kind of get us there, I want to paint the picture of some of these places that we can feel stuck when it comes to delegating. And I know I’ve been in all these situations. So I know managing a team, I’ve felt like, oh, I don’t want to delegate little stuff that feels like I made a list of all the stuff I don’t like doing and gave it to my team member because I don’t want to chip away at their motivation.
I don’t want them to think that I think they should do all this tedious work. And I sort of feel guilty, okay? So maybe that’s you. If that resonates with you, I hear you, okay? We’ve all been there. I think other times we don’t delegate because we think we’re actually better at all the things, okay? And if this is you, that’s okay too. That we say, well, I’m really good at this task. I’m really fast at it.
I know it’s going to be done right. And so delegating, it feels like it’s going to slow it down and maybe make it done worse than I would do it. Okay? Fair. If that’s how I think, that’s cool too. Other times we feel like, well, I really want to delegate this thing. I don’t want to do it, but I don’t think my team members are really able to take that thing on. And so there’s some fear around, well, I can’t have this thing done through like a learning curve process.
I need it done right. So I’m just going to kind of keep doing it. And I would guess a lot of us fall into this third bucket that, yeah, we’re not opposed to delegating. Maybe we don’t have the belief that it’s just throwing somewhere in the fence, but we aren’t, we don’t think our team is really, you know, set up yet to be able to do that. And without getting too far into like how to delegate, I would say a lot of times the answer is just setting clear expectations.
And I know I’ve got a few episodes on this that I’ll link to in the show notes. Setting clear expectations, make sure that you are really setting up whoever’s taking this thing on for success so that they can not only know what you are envision with this task, but they know where to put their creative spin on it. So that’s like a little kind of jump to how we get from not really being sure people can handle it to how we let someone really run with it is by setting clear expectations and really painting the picture of what success looks like.
But again, now what’s the problem with when we don’t delegate? Well, we’ve already talked about, right? It means that we’re stuck in the weeds. We’re stuck doing more work than we really have to be doing. And I think a lot of us, if we’re the business owner, if we’re a senior manager, we’re managing managers, this means that really the value of our time, it’s being spent on things that could be higher value tasks. So let’s say we’re a service provider or a coach or consultant or doing something that we could be, you know, working with clients and charging a pretty high hourly rate.
Instead of charging that hourly rate and working with the clients, we’re in the weeds like managing folder structures and social media copy and hashtags. So we end up taking this kind of potential revenue that we could be incurring and like walking away from that, leaving that on the table and spending our time on these little things we don’t have to be doing. And so the moment we make this shift, the moment we figure this out, when we roll out the ops playbook and figure out what are those key decisions we could be delegating?
What are those tasks? That’s how we can recoup money right away. Because when we say, oh, here’s the places that I’m spending time on things that I don’t have to be, boom, right? You can be now having more time open to perform services, to be coaching, to doing that consulting work, whatever that looks like, which is really that income producing activities. I think the other piece when we don’t delegate is that we take an opportunity away from our team members to really step up as a leader.
And this may even have a higher cost, right? Because this can chip away at team morale. Team members can feel like we don’t trust them and then maybe they don’t stay. And there is nothing more expensive than high turnover because we spend so much time looking for candidates, recruiting, interviewing, ramping people up, really helping people be set up for success. That if they feel they’re not empowered, that you don’t really trust them, that you’re not letting them really step up and do the job and have autonomy.
If they leave because of that, you got to do all that over again. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager. I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too, even when I had been managing people for a while because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time.
So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet. Click to LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager. This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results. There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or write freaking out. LeahGarvin.com slash scorecard. So when we’re not delegating, this is where team members can feel like, well, I guess they just wanted to hire someone that they gave like direct marching orders to.
And a lot of people don’t want to do that. Or they feel like they were sold a different job than they’re able to perform. Or they feel like, well, I could step up and do some of this if you set clear expectations or if you gave me a little coaching. So it can chip away at trust. And I think, again, that’s one of the bigger things we want to address because sometimes because we’re trying to spare someone from doing some kind of task that maybe we thought, oh, I don’t want to throw this over the fence or, you know, I don’t want to burden someone with this.
They actually interpret that as you not thinking they’re capable of doing it. And so we don’t want to have that happen, right? Because that’s not even what we meant. So that’s another one of the costs of not delegating. And then I think the biggest one, you know, the kind of combination of all of these, it’s just the stress that you feel as a business owner, as a manager, as a team leader. The feeling like you have all this stuff and the to-do list and the task list never ends.
And it’s just one more thing after the next. And you feel like, gosh, I’m a bottleneck, but I don’t really know how to get out from under that. This is one of the biggest pain points business owners have shared with me is like, I want to scale myself. I want to be doing more income producing activity. I want to be able to empower my team. I just don’t know where to start. And that’s why this is one of the six areas we dive into with the Ops Playbook is we figure out, okay, well, what are those places that you absolutely have to be involved in?
What are all the rest of those? And what are the steps we need to do to take to get there? And during that three months implementation that I provide through the Ops Playbook, we make sure all those steps can happen so that you can hand everything off. Now let’s talk about what looks on the other side because this is where all the magic happens. What happens when we have delegated stuff? Okay. Well, essentially it’s the flip side of all the issues, but let’s just talk about it.
So first and foremost, going kind of backwards to forwards, the stress that’s relieved by knowing you are working on the exact right things, you can’t really put a cost on that, right? You’re not laying awake at night like, oh God, I got to add this, I got to add this. You’re like, oh no. When I get this kind of activity, when this kind of task comes to my plate, I do it. When I get this kind, my team does it.
When I get this kind, I outsource it. When I get this time, I put it on that backlog, right? You have clarity for what to do when new work comes up and that allows you to really prioritize your time better and really lean into your team members, okay? So then that handles the, the second thing I mentioned is really breeding trust in your team because when we have communicated, you know, hey, here’s what I really want y’all to focus on.
Here’s some opportunities to grow. Hey, I heard that you are excited about this and that’s why I’m handing this off. Super quick segue is that the more we get to know our team members and their career goals and their interests, the more we can have a targeted approach to how we delegate. And I was just on the phone with someone this morning, a manager talking about, you know, she had a team member that was really analytical and the person was really wanting to bring data in the way they were working and they brought it up a few times and she was really looking for opportunities to help that person really lean into that passion.
And so she had a task on her plate. Then she said, oh, this is something that would be so much better if we brought an analytical lens to it. And then she went to that team member and said, hey, I’d love for you to run with this thing and really bring in all of the data, all the analytical thinking so that we can really amplify this. And the team member was thrilled because not only did she get a leadership opportunity, but she saw that her manager really, really valued this skill that she wanted to bring into the work and had been proactively looking for opportunities to help her lean into that.
Right. And so you can imagine how much trust that breeds with that person and her team member. How much confidence that team member has in her manager that she’s looking out for me, right? Because she delegated this thing and knew exactly the right kind of thing to delegate. Okay. So that’s some of the power in that. Now, the last one of feeling like, gosh, I, I’m just in two, my hands are in too many pies. I’m in too many things.
I’m spread too thin. Right. You can see that when we figure out what to delegate, those feelings don’t happen anymore. We’re not that bottleneck. We’re not causing this sort of slowdown and things because people are waiting for, you know, the next assignment to be made. We’ve created a clear process for it. Well, how do people know when they need approval or how do they know when something’s done? How do they know when they need your input?
Because we’ve communicated what that looks like. And that will start to free up so much stress on, on, on your mind because you’re not wondering, Oh God, if I don’t check my email for an hour, how much of the business have I slowed down? And we never want to be in that situation. Okay. We’re the visionary. We’re the idea person. We’re really moving that ship forward. We’re driving the strategy, but we don’t have to be involved in every single thing.
And that is, again, this reframe. And when we reframe our feeling of, of, you know, delegating and handing things off, this, this takes away control so that this can elevate our business. This can elevate our team. This can create that bench of leaders. Now, now we’re able to really reach kind of ultimate scale, ultimate impact because there’s no stopping it. You have exponential growth, but we know the old thing, you know, the old saying, it says like if you want to go faster, go alone.
If you want to go further, go together. I think that is right. I’ll look it up and make sure, but we have to, have to bring our team members in. If we want to scale, we know we’ve got to bring more people into the fold. If we want to scale, we know we have to let go of certain things. It’s just time to do it. But the first, I think, again, the first place we can get stuck is this belief that delegating is bad.
I don’t want to do it. So let’s shake that off. Let’s reframe it. Let’s bring in some of these strategies, right, of really figuring out what are the right things to delegate, how to communicate those expectations, what does success look like and come out the other side. Because again, like I said, this is one of those biggest places that we can save money instantly. Okay. A client I have that, that runs a PR firm. She was realizing, you know, she was spending a lot of time on writing, you know, creating templates for press releases and researching different things around press releases and doing a lot of the social media, editing, things like that.
She offloaded all of those tasks to folks that were really better suited to do that anyway, saved about three or four hours right out of the gate that she could now use doing PR for her high profile clients that she was charging a thousand dollars an hour for. Right? So it’s about $4,000 a week that we got back just by making that quick shift and moving some tasks that were actually better suited for other team members that they wanted to be doing to their place.
This is the change that we can make when we reframe our fears and hesitations around delegating. All right. So if you are ready to get started, I am ready to support you. Send me a message, reach out, LeahGarvin.com and let’s talk about it, right? If you’re feeling stuck, if you’re not really sure what to delegate, that is the perfect thing to start with. We can look at, well, how are you spending time? Identify what are those things that you want to hand off and go from there.
Okay. LeahGarvin.com and sign up for that free strategy call. Let’s dive in. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to 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
Why is delegating so hard for small business owners to actually do?
There are usually three reasons owners get stuck. First, guilt, feeling like you're just dumping tedious work on someone. Second, the belief that you're faster or better at the task yourself. Third, not trusting that your team is ready to handle it yet. None of these mean delegation is wrong. They mean the system for setting expectations isn't in place yet. Once you define what success looks like and give your team member a clear picture of the outcome you want, most of that hesitation disappears.
How much time can I actually save by delegating more tasks?
The savings can be immediate and significant. One example from the show is a PR firm owner who was spending time writing press release templates, doing research, and editing social media content. She moved those tasks to team members better suited for them and freed up three to four hours a week. At her client rate of a thousand dollars an hour, that translated to roughly four thousand dollars a week in recovered income-producing time. The shift happens fast once you identify the right tasks to hand off.
What happens to my team when I don't delegate enough?
When you hold too much, team members often interpret it as you not trusting them or not thinking they're capable, even if that was never your intention. Over time that chips away at morale and can cause people to leave. Turnover is one of the most expensive problems a business can face because recruiting, interviewing, and ramping someone new takes enormous time and money. Delegating well is one of the clearest signals to your team that you trust them and want them to grow.
How do I know which tasks to delegate and which ones to keep?
Start by looking honestly at how you're spending your time and identifying everything that someone else could handle with the right expectations set. Ask yourself: does this task require me specifically, or am I doing it out of habit or hesitation? Tasks like folder management, social media copy, or template creation are often things a team member could own fully. Your time should be focused on income-producing work, strategy, and decisions only you can make. Everything else is a candidate for delegation.
Can delegating actually build stronger relationships with my team?
Yes, and it works best when you match tasks to what your team members actually care about. If you know someone on your team is eager to bring more analytical thinking into their work, and a task lands on your plate that needs exactly that skill, handing it to them with that context is powerful. It shows you listened, you remembered, and you're actively looking for ways to help them grow. That kind of targeted delegation builds real trust and makes people want to stay.