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
“Nobody thinks they have trust issues until they try to delegate something and then, oh my God, we realize, yeah, yeah.”
“…maybe it’s not as bad as we think it is if we just bring clarity and communicate what’s going on.”
Episode highlights
The real reason delegation stalls (hint: it is not your workload)
Most leaders who feel buried blame their schedule, their team’s readiness, or their manager’s expectations. Lia reframes all three as a single root cause: trust. The three flavors are (1) not trusting your team member to handle it, (2) not trusting yourself to explain a task that feels intuitive in your head, and (3) not trusting that your manager will still see you as valuable if you let go. Until you name which one is actually running the show, no productivity hack will fix it.
When your manager is breathing down your neck
The third trust issue gets the least airtime, and Lia argues it is the most common blocker for leaders who genuinely want to delegate. If your boss keeps pulling you into every detail, the instinct is to stay in the weeds so you always have an answer ready. That instinct quietly sabotages both your team and your own growth. The fix is not to grip tighter. It is to manage up.
The Demo Fest story: delegating something you hate to someone who loves it
Lia shares a story from her time in big tech. She had built a company-wide demo event (think the Oscars of product launches) and dreaded every minute of planning it. When she hired a program manager who genuinely loved events, the handoff seemed obvious. But their VP wanted constant updates, which meant Lia’s manager was pulling her back in, and Lia kept showing up in meetings her team member had already taken over. Her team member called it out directly: “You said you don’t even like dealing with events. What are you doing in all my meetings?”
That moment forced Lia to see the real problem. She was not blocking the project because of the work. She was blocking it because she had not set expectations with her own manager.
The managing-up conversation that unlocked everything
Lia went to her manager and laid out the full picture: who owned the project, what the plan looked like, when they would sync on Wednesdays, and how she would brief her manager every Thursday. One proactive conversation replaced weeks of anxious hovering. Her manager’s response was simple: “I just wanted to make sure you had a plan.” That is the pattern Lia sees repeatedly. Most managers who seem to be micromanaging are not trying to take over. They want evidence that someone is thinking clearly. Give them that evidence and the pressure releases on both ends.
The Loom trick for delegating tasks that live only in your head
For the trust-yourself barrier, Lia recommends a fast, low-effort workaround. Open Loom (or any screen-recording tool) and narrate yourself doing the task in real time. Say out loud every small step, every tab you open, every judgment call you make. When you are done, you have a video SOP ready to hand off. It forces you to slow down just enough to see that the task is actually explainable, and it removes the excuse that there is no time to document anything.
Setting expectations in both directions
Whether you are managing up or managing down, the framework is the same. Cover what the work is, what the non-negotiables are, what done looks like, and when you will check in. Lia ran this with her team member (Wednesday syncs, clear definition of a great outcome) and with her manager (Thursday briefings, a plan for when the VP needed an immediate answer). Both conversations together created the space for real delegation to happen.
Why delegating well makes you look more capable, not less
A common fear, especially for business owners whose clients want to work specifically with them, is that handing off work signals a downgrade. Lia flips this. When you explain why you matched a specific person to a specific project and describe how you are staying looped in, you are demonstrating strategic judgment. You are not disappearing. You are showing that you have built something bigger than yourself, and that builds more trust with clients and stakeholders than doing everything alone ever could.
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)
I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Nobody thinks they have trust issues until they try to delegate something and then, oh my God, we realize, yeah, yeah. I don’t think either I can do it or they can do it, or my manager can do it, and everything goes out the window. And that’s when I talk about today how to actually tap into where this trust issue exists so that you can stop feeling like you have to do everything yourself.
I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the New Manager Playbook. Alright, so what do I mean when I say, you know, nobody, nobody knows they have trust issues until we start delegating. Well, I think a lot of us feel like we’re in the weeds, we’re overwhelmed, we’re inundated with work. We can’t figure out what to focus on next, and we think that it’s maybe a skills thing. Our team members can’t, can’t quite cut it, or they’re not ready, or we just say, we don’t have time.
Or we say, well, my manager wants to know all the information. What actually is the common thing there? This is a trust thing. If we say our team members don’t, aren’t quite ready, or they need a lot of handholding things, this is that we don’t trust that team member. If we say we don’t have time, we, we just can’t stop. We’re doing, we don’t actually trust ourselves. Maybe we don’t know how to actually explain this thing because it’s so intuitive to ourselves.
Maybe we feel like, like we. You know, are scared. We might miss a step and we it it, and we don’t realize that’s what’s going on, but it’s actually that we don’t trust that we’ll be able to explain it. Right. And then maybe we feel like, well, I’d love to delegate, but I got my manager breathing down my neck and if I let go for one second they’re gonna think, what the hell do I even do here?
And that third one. The managing up issue is what I wanna talk about today because this is something I don’t think we spend enough time on talking about the importance of managing up when it comes to delegating, because this issue is really pointing towards a trust building opportunity between you and your own manager, or your own client, or your own vp, your own stakeholder, whoever it is. And when we’re not delegated, because we think someone’s gonna be coming to us for the answers.
Gosh, like it’s actually a really easy solution if we, if we actually set it up well. So I wanna share a story about years ago I was working in tech and I was. Managing. I had to manage this event one year and if anybody knows anything about working in tech, they love demos. It is like the Oscars of, of working in big tech is showing your product in a demo. It is so exciting for everyone and I put together this demo fest where we had like a hundred different demos across all our team.
We rented out a big auditorium. We had food. We all these things. And putting that event together was my worst nightmare because I do not like planning events. It freaks me out. It is so scary. What if no one shows up? Or what if something goes wrong? And everyone blames me and it’s like, Ugh, that keeps me up at night. But the first year I did it, I, I really, because I was so panicked about it, I did a really good job with it.
I overthought every detail. I, I panicked till the end, and, and it went well. And so our VP being that demos are the Oscars of tech, um, he loved this event and the rest of the year was like gearing up for Demo Fest year two. And I was like, ah, please, no. But anyway, I ended up hiring a team member. Program manager under me, and she loved planning events. This was her moment, and so I thought, yes, oh my God, I have the perfect situation.
I can delegate this to a team member who’s actually wants to do this in the first place. Lets me off the hook, and this is in her sweet spot. She was gonna really crush this. So it was all set up great. Now, when we kicked off this project. Our VP wanted to know every single detail, so he was asking my boss every single detail, and I was feeling like, well, I wanna let go. I wanna delegate this.
I don’t wanna be running this event, but if I let go, my manager’s gonna be, I’m not gonna be able to give her an update. And then it’s gonna look like, well, what am I doing here? And so I felt really stuck. Initially I would just be very far in the weeds and my team members started getting frustrated and she’s like, Hey, listen, you said you don’t even like dealing with events. What are you doing in all my meetings?
And I realized this was a moment where I was going to kind of sabotage this project by, by not managing up and not dealing with the real issue was setting expectations with my own manager. And again, this is where that trust thing comes in that I talked about was that I was worried. That she wouldn’t think that I had handled this well or that she didn’t trust me to be able to know what I should offload.
Right? And even if that wasn’t even what she was thinking, there was a moment that I had to actually deal with that so that I could let my team run with something that she was really good at that I didn’t even wanna do. So this is the moment that I think a lot of us miss, right, is, is stopping and saying, wait a second. This block I’m having is really getting in the way of, of letting someone on my team excel.
But the block wasn’t being caused by me, so to speak. It was pressure. My own manager was feeling from her manager, right? So it was kind of a domino situation. So I went to my manager and I said, Hey, um, you know, I know you’re getting a lot of pressure from our VP and I wanna share how I’ve set this up. So I have offloaded, um, you know, I, I have, you know, our team member managing the, the, um, demo fest here, and she.
Really has this whole plan. I’m really excited about it. This whole vision, like it’s taking what I did last year, like 10 Xing it, it’s gonna be awesome. And here’s what she has in progress. Here’s her project plan. She and I are gonna be meeting every Wednesday to talk about it. Is it okay if I update you every Thursday morning? We can walk through the plan in detail, address any questions then. And by sharing with her.
Under the hood insight into what I had worked out with my own team member. She could say, yeah, totally, but that’s great. Like I just wanted to make sure you had a plan. And I think this is the thing that happens to us sometimes when our own manager is breathing down our neck and asking us stuff. We assume, oh, they don’t trust me. They don’t think I’m a good leader. They don’t think this, they just wanna do it themselves and, and actually all my manager wanted to know was like, yeah, I did have a plan.
I thought it through and I’m getting updated. And she will have a way to be kept in the loop. So this is where the trust thing comes up again, right? Is that like, maybe it’s not as bad as we think it is if we just bring clarity and communicate what’s going on. So in that situation, I shared the plan with my manager and she said, okay, and you know there will be sometimes where our VP wants an answer right now and we’ve gotta go get it for him.
Then I was able to relay that back to my team member and she said, okay, like I get it. But then I was able to create space on both ends. This is why I always talk about how all these strategies I share make it easier for you because this makes it easier for you to focus on what you wanna be focusing on because you delegated this thing and now you can literally let it go and let it run and go ahead with it.
And that was a pivotal moment for me to see because it, it actually built trust on both sides. And it let me scale myself and not do this event that I wasn’t supposed to be doing anyway and, and focus on something else. Like I think I had to be working on hiring a new team member, which actually was really time investing right. So let’s recap some of the skills that I deployed and how you’d reproduce this in your team.
And I think truly it’s about if you’re struggling with delegating and you’re like, oh, like I don’t know where it’s really showing up. Um, I’m feeling a block towards it. I’m really resisting. Um, you know, first of all, if you don’t really recognize if you’re resisting it, if you’re feeling overwhelmed. Underwater and you have a team, there is an opportunity to delegate something. I’m just gonna tell you that, like you can write me an email and tell me I’m wrong if you feel like there’s nothing you can delegate.
But there’s really always an opportunity to delegate something, in my opinion. Let’s just say that. Call it what it is. So we wanna identify Will, is it We’re not trusting ourself to actually slow down and, and figure out what those steps look like. A quick, quick hack for what I do in that situation is I will run through a task recording it on loom that video recording software and explain, narrate what I’m doing. I’ll say, okay, first I, uh, sending an email to a client with a deck first.
I’ll open up, um, you know, I’ll open up Gmail. I grab my template. I write this first. I make sure that they hadn’t sent me an EMA before. I’ll reference something we had just talked about. Literally narrate step by step what you’re doing. Now you have literal video, SOP, or like task list of how you’re gonna handle that next time this gave gives, it really makes it really easy to hand that off. So that’s a really great thing to do.
If you’re feeling like, I can’t, I don’t have time to stop. I can’t think of it and I don’t really know what I’m doing in the process. Forcing yourself to narrate it, that’s actually gonna really help. Now if it’s managing upper, managing down, all of that comes down to setting expectations. And I know I’ve talked about what this looks like in a number of different episodes, so I won’t go into detail exactly, you know, to to total depth ’cause we’ll save that for another conversation.
But it means talking about what you’re doing, what is the plan? You know, what are the non-negotiables? When are you gonna be reviewing stuff, when are you gonna update? What does success look like? Those are the fundamentals of setting expectations. So I did that with the team member around, Hey, we gotta get, you know, updates every Wednesday. We’re gonna be checking in here. Here’s what done looks like. Here’s what a great job looks like. And then you set, when you’re managing up and you want to create space to delegate, you’re setting expectations that way, right?
I told my manager, okay, here’s what I’ve made a plan with my team member route. Here’s how we’ll fill you in. And here’s what we do. When the VP comes in, comes in hot with some updates they’re wanting. See what I mean? So when we, when we actually utilize these tools, right? When we put ’em to use, I told you they’d come in handy. When we do this, we create so much space and not only do we set people up for success, but it has these secondary benefits.
Like it’s building trust. Because in showing my manager that I had a really solid plan for this, she’s like, oh wow, we can, like, Leah’s got this. I don’t need to worry about this anymore. She maybe even communicated to the VP like, God, I’m really proud of how Leah’s running this demo fest. She, she ran it on her own last year and now she scaled it and her team member’s running it. Like, this is how we demonstrate our, our competencies.
Right? And, and if we are, you know, if we’re a business owner. This is how we really show our team, like our clients, that we have a powerhouse team. A question that I get sometimes from, from business owners is like when they’re delivering the service that, you know, my clients just want me. It’s really hard for me to scale my team. This also shows up in agencies, whether you’re corporate or independent, that you know, you have that creative director and everyone wants to work with them, and they’re like, no, do I wanna work with the B team?
And it’s on you. To show that it’s not a B team, that you have handpicked experts to actually, you know, be doing the job the best they can. So if you’re running a creative agency, you know you have this perfect person that does 3D because this project’s for that, or this really awesome person that does emotion or, or really understands like where tiktoks going, whatever it looks like you, it’s on you to amplify your team. And that’s actually the parallel to managing up what I was talking about is that you saying, oh.
I have this person on this project because that is gonna give you the best result. And here’s how I’m making sure that I’m still looped into it. So I’m really translating your vision. That is how we make sure everybody sees like, yeah, and it it, it gives them more trust in you because you have identified the right people to solve that problem. Okay? So fear of delegating, hate to tell you, spoiler. It, it’s a trust issue, but it’s not one that we can’t overcome.
And when we try these strategies, I assure you. We can get so much easier now still, this is delegating specifically is one of the biggest challenges that managers that run into because it can feel when we’re under so much pressure, like I just don’t know what to delegate. I can’t figure it out. My team members are like, no, don’t put anything more on my plate and I don’t wanna do it. My own manager’s pressuring me. So I just wanna say this is one of the areas that.
I have di divin, dove in divin, whatever. I have dove deep, excuse me, very, very deep with teams and help them find relief. So if this is something your team members are really struggling with, time management, kind of a trust feeling in the weeds, these are all signals that there’s some delegating opportunities, send me an email [email protected]. I have a specific workshop that really addresses this and has given teams immediate relief, like saving them 4, 5, 6 hours a week.
Which translates to thousands of dollars a week, a month, that saves back your business. That can be reinvested in other places, right? If you’re in the corporate world, that’s all time that can be spent on other projects. So this relief that I’m able to create by focusing in on exactly what’s getting in the way of delegating this is something that’s gonna be game changing. So if your team is feeling stuck with this specifically, send me an email [email protected] and I will share more about this workshop.
That’s just gonna be game changing for your team. All right, see you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why do I feel like I can't stop doing everything myself even when I have a team?
The real reason is almost always a trust issue, even if it does not feel that way at first. If you think your team members are not ready, that is a trust issue with them. If you say you do not have time to explain things, that is often a trust issue with yourself, where you are not confident you can break down something that feels intuitive to you. And if you worry your manager will question your value the moment you let go, that is a trust issue pointing to an unresolved expectation between you and your own leader. The missing piece is not time. It is identifying which of those trust gaps is actually blocking you.
How do I delegate when my manager keeps asking me for every detail and I feel like I cannot let go?
Go to your manager and walk them through the plan you have already put in place. Share who is handling the work, what that person is doing, when you are meeting with them, and how you will pass updates up the chain. Most of the time, a manager who is asking lots of questions just wants to know you have thought it through. Once you show them the structure, they can relax. Then you relay any non-negotiables back to your team member so everyone knows what to expect. That clarity creates space on both ends and lets you actually let go.
What is a quick way to figure out how to hand off a task I have always done myself?
Record yourself doing the task using a screen recording tool like Loom and narrate every single step out loud as you go. Say things like, first I open Gmail, then I grab my template, then I check whether they sent something recently. By the time you finish, you have a real step-by-step video and task list someone else can follow. This is especially useful when a task feels too intuitive to explain, because the act of narrating it forces you to slow down and see what you are actually doing.
How do I convince clients that my team can do the work just as well as I can?
It is on you to actively position your team members as the right experts for each specific job, not just as backup. When you tell a client you have chosen a particular person because their skills are the best fit for this project, and you explain how you are staying looped in to make sure your vision is being translated, that builds confidence rather than eroding it. Clients trust you more, not less, when they see you have identified the right people and built a real system around them.
What should I tell my team member when I delegate something but my manager keeps pulling me back into the details?
Be transparent with your team member about the reality. After you have set expectations with your manager about how updates will flow, loop your team member into what those non-negotiables look like. For example, let them know that sometimes a senior leader will need an answer quickly and you will come to them for it. When a team member understands the full picture, they are far less likely to feel undermined or confused about why you keep showing up in their work. Clear expectations on both sides is what creates actual room for the person to do their job.