Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking about delegation actually why you shouldn't delegate and what you should do instead. So over this past week I've been doing a lot of poking around on LinkedIn. We are officially, creating a liberating team's presence on LinkedIn.
We are liberating LinkedIn, y'all. So if you are on LinkedIn, you wanna be checking in on what we're up to, but not get caught. Scrolling through Instagram go over there and check it out. But as I was scrolling through LinkedIn, I was seeing a lot around, oh, you're that overwhelmed leader.
You're in the weeds. You're on the brink of burnout. You just need to delegate. You need to delegate more. You're not delegating the right way. You need to do this delegation framework. If you could just delegate. It would solve everything you'd be able to pull up. You'd have so much more time back, you wouldn't be on the brink of burnout.
And let me just say, I'm calling bullshit. Delegating is not the answer. And do I have a personal vendetta against delegating? Yes. Yes I do.
Because I feel like we put the blame on these leaders who are drowning and we're like, it's something wrong with you. If you knew how to delegate, if you were a better leader, then you wouldn't be experiencing this. And that is not the case at all. It is our broken system for leadership that requires leaders to be in the center of everything to where delegating is the answer.
That's the problem. So let me explain what the heck I'm talking about. The definition of delegation, yes, I looked it up, is to send or authorize someone to do something as a representative. So when you are delegating something, you are handing off the execution of the work, but just that one part, that's it.
You as the leader are still holding responsibility for everything else. You have ownership over the work. You're still in charge of setting the direction, figuring out what work we're going after, what we're prioritizing, what we're saying no to. You are often still the one who holds the context. You're the one in the meetings.
You are the one on the email chains. You are the one making the real decisions. You are the one approving every step. Because at the end of the day, you are responsible for the outcome. You are simply sending them as a representative to execute on part of the work. So I actually think delegating. Is more harmful in a lot of cases than simply doing the work yourself or what we're gonna talk about today, which is transferring ownership of the outcome.
Because when you are delegating, you are stuck in this messy middle. You own the outcome. You have, you know, everything required to do the work, and you're simply parsing out bits and pieces of it to individuals on your team. And so they're not fully equipped to own it. And this is what creates this dichotomy of you.
Them having to come to you for everything. Them having to come to you for, Hey, what should we do about this? Hey, how do you wanna solve this problem? Hey, can you look over this? Hey, can you check that I've, you know, made the right decision because you are still the one responsible for the outcome at the end of the day.
And they're just the doer.
And now some of y'all are listening right now and you're like, no, I've delegated outcomes, not tasks. So this isn't me, but I want you to keep listening because we're gonna talk about how to actually empower your team to own the outcome, to make sure they have what they need, to truly have ownership over it.
And I promise you, I'm gonna stretch you in your thinking in that way. But first, let's talk about what I mean by switching from delegating and treating your team like you know, a bunch of TaskRabbits for hire, where you are the owner of the strategy and what we're doing and why we're doing it, and the context and the real decisions, and you're simply parsing out tasks for them to go execute.
And how do we instead start treating our teams like owners, owners of bodies of work, and we instead are their strategic advisors. We're the ones they come to, you know. Find gaps and talk through barriers and help get the influence they need to drive work forward. Were the strategic advisor, not the owner.
So first off, we need to talk about giving our team true ownership over work instead of delegating tasks. And this starts by looking back at your job descriptions. Y'all job descriptions are total trash. I'm just gonna say it. They are. I spent. Four years of my career doing job analysis, writing job descriptions.
I spent like a whole year of my career when I was just starting out doing job analysis and writing job descriptions that were legally defensible. Most companies don't have a person dedicated to doing that, to actually understanding the work, what's required all of that good stuff.
Instead, most job descriptions are developed by, well, one, we just pull whatever the most recent one was on file, so it's like 10 years old and we're just making it work. Two, we pull one from the job description pool of like, Hey, let's just copy that. Marketing analysts that they're using over there.
And sure that will apply to finance. Just change the words or we start, you know, searching around, poking on LinkedIn or Indeed, and we just start copying and pasting bullets. So job descriptions completely irrelevant. They are a list of, you know, 20 tasks and knowledge, skills and abilities that sounded good at the time.
The accuracy, like maybe 50% at best, and they're usually outdated the second we write them, because the work moves at such a fast speed that the work's changing and, and the way that you're providing value to the team is changing with it. So the first thing we need to recognize, job descriptions.
Total garbage. So what we talk about in Liberated Leader is the concept of roll cards. We don't have time to get into that right now. But essentially this is a more agile form of a job description that instead of listing, 15 to 20 tasks, which again. Keeps our team in this place of task rabbits go execute on this to-do list that's going to help me as the leader drive forward on these outcomes that I own, and instead we organize our teams around outcomes.
Here are the three to five outcomes that you are responsible for owning. And you are also responsible for, how we're going to achieve these outcomes, tracking progress against them making the decisions. You are the one in the meetings, on the email chains for these things, you are responsible for everything to do with this outcome.
So there's no, you can just check the box on your task list and say, I did it. Yay me. Until we've reached this outcome, you are responsible for problem solving and strategizing and doing what it takes to reach that and maintain it. So just right there, that is a massive shift because now as the leader aren't responsible for the thing, you are not driving it.
You are not, you know, continuing to have to. Help push them. Change course problem solve until they get it, they own the outcome. Let me give you an example. And I'm reading these examples literally out of the facilitation guide that I give you for developing role cards in the Liberated Leader self-managed system curriculum.
Let's say right now on your team, you are responsible for the marketing team. And one of the tasks that your content developers are responsible for is writing email campaigns. So that's a task that we've assigned them. You are responsible for writing the email campaigns, but you as the leader are truly owning the outcome, which is owning the entire email strategy.
That drives subscriber engagement and maybe achieves an opening rate of greater than 25%. So, you know in your head, that's what we're striving for. That's what we're trying to achieve. You know that through our email strategy, we have to increase engagement. And increase open rates to this 25%. So you are sitting there thinking, okay, what do we need to do?
We need to write email campaigns. We need to do it in this way. They need to go out at this frequency, they need to incorporate these things. I need to be checking to see what's working, what's not tracking the analytics I need to be adjusting behavior and what we're doing based off of that. So you are the one who's responsible for all of that.
And you are then parsing out the execution, delegating the tasks to your team. But see, your team isn't privy to all that. They're not privy to, you know that, that internal thinking, that process that you're doing. And so because they're not privy to that and because they don't have ownership of that, every single time they do something, they have to come back to your doorstep.
They have to say, okay, we wrote these email campaigns. Now what? Okay, here's the analytics. Let's look over it and you tell me what to do based off of them. Okay? We're running into a problem here with this email campaign. What should I do? Because we've only delegated the task and we maintain the outcome.
We have made them dependent on us. We are still central to them getting work done, and that can be okay at lower levels of leadership if you're in like team lead manager where you are remaining super close to the work. But as you grow up through your leadership career and you get into those senior lead levels of leadership, that's no longer doable.
Yet y'all, I cannot tell you how many senior leaders I am talking about, senior director, VP level, who are still doing redoing, checking the work in their day to day or even at night and just fitting in their true job, the strategic work in the cracks. Because all we've been taught our entire leadership career is how to drive work forward by being in it.
No one's ever taught us how to and truly equip a team with the clarity, with the context, with the authority they need to own the work. And no matter how super we are at getting everything done, and no matter how great of multitaskers we, we are, if we continue to try to balance those two things, the execution and the strategy, something will have to give.
And this is why. Not gonna go on a whole soapbox on this, but I could why? I think strategy in most teams has become such an afterthought. So many teams tell me we don't have time for the strategic work. We don't have time for the transformative work. We, that completely goes to the wayside because we're so buried in the weeds that leaders don't even do strategy anymore.
It's offloaded to a strategy role, or it becomes so watered down. It's just like a process. We go through once a year. And then we jump right back into the weeds, into the work. That's why we have so many teams who are burned out. That's why we have so many teams who are not driving the impact they could be if we were approaching their work strategically.
Okay. I'm off my soapbox. Let's get back to empowering teams and delegating. Let's get back to handing off outcomes. So as I was saying, we need to define out instead of the tasks, the 15 task job descriptions for each role on our team developing, what are the three to five outcomes that each individual role on your team owns?
So what this looks like is instead of managing project plans. Owns the delivery of projects on time, on scope, and on budget that tells them you are responsible for these three things. You're not just managing a project plan. You're responsible for this outcome. Instead of logging help desk tickets, it looks like owning first response resolution, maintaining an under 24 hour turnaround time and high customer satisfaction.
We could make that one even more specific, but so it's not just your responsible for logging the tickets, you're actually responsible for thinking through, how can I get turnaround time lower? How can I increase customer satisfaction? What are different ways I could be doing my job? What are different solutions that, you know, I could be coming up with?
What are barriers getting in my way and how could I solve them? It it pulls out and ask our team to do, to approach their job in a different way. You are not a check the box doer. I'm asking you to own an outcome, to be a strategic thinker. Instead of tracking inventory, you own the inventory management system that avoids stockouts or overages.
It's not enough that you can just check the box. I track the inventory. You have to do it in a way that we are achieving this outcome. Instead of develops onboarding materials, it's, you own the onboarding process that ramps new hires to productivity within 30 days. So now, instead of just going through, there's a million different ways I could develop onboarding materials, a million different things that that could look like.
And so what am I doing when you handed me that task? I'm coming to your doorstep every five seconds. Hey, is this what you were looking for? Is this what you were thinking? Is this what you want me to do? Should I change this? Should I tweak this? They're constantly coming to you. It's like, I always equate it to where you remember in school when a teacher would give you an assignment and they'd be like, you need to write this paper.
It's due on this week, and like, that's it. And there you see me in the back corner of the classroom, sweat and bullets. Like, wait, what? Where's the syllabus? Where's the criteria? What's the outcome that I'm looking to achieve? What am I being graded on? They're like, ah, yeah, write the paper on the book. Submit it.
So stressful. So stressful. 'cause I have no guardrails. I don't understand what I'm trying to achieve. So what do I have to do? I've got to come to you and ask clarifying questions every five seconds because you are the one who has the outcome in your head. You are the one still maintaining ownership of it.
You haven't truly handed it off to me. So it it's putting your team in this place of anxiety, of trying to read your mind. When you tell me I own the onboarding process that gets hi new hires from new hire to productive member of the team within 30 days. Now I have something I gotta go after. I'm not just showing up to work every day to run on the hamster wheel open other day, developing onboarding materials.
Let's go check the box. Do the ch the to-do list. No, it's, I'm coming in with a finish line. I have something that I'm working towards. I am looking at this onboarding process and I'm saying, okay, what's going to, what do people need to go from new hire to productive within 30 days? What do they need to know?
What do they need to do? Who do they need to talk to? Okay, cool. What's the best way to communicate that to, to teach them that? What are the different avenues I could use? Okay, let's develop some ideas. Let's get a prototype. Let's test it. On this new hire coming in, let's talk to them. Let's you know, measure how productive they are.
Okay, what worked, what didn't? Let's tweak it. Here's some ideas, here's some solutions. Do you see the giant shift that that just created in what we're asking our team to do that is the difference between, hey, here, go develop onboarding materials and hey, I want you to own this outcome. Of getting new hires up to being productive members in the team within 30 days.
That's the difference. Delegating bullshit, handing over outcomes. Actually transferring ownership. You are now responsible for achieving this result. That's what gets work off your plate. That's what allows you to get out of the weeds. That's what starts empowering your teams. Y'all, I feel like, do I wrap it up here?
I feel like we're gonna wrap this episode up here, and then next episode we're gonna do a part two and we're gonna talk about how to act. So you've delegated the outcome, but how do you actually empower your team to step up and own it? How do you actually get them what they need? To run with that without you having to step back in every five seconds.
We're gonna talk about that on part two. Your action item for this episode is to go look at your teams. Have you been delegating tasks or are you delegating outcomes? And it is not enough if you feel like you've done it, if your team cannot repeat it back to you, it doesn't matter. A really good activity for you guys to go do is have everyone on your team write down the three to five outcomes they believe they're responsible for, and then I want you to do the same for every role on your team.
And then have a discussion. You can do this one-on-one. So over the next week, cross compare the different responses, or if your team's moving closer to being that self-managed team who can have this type of discussion in a group environment. Bring it to a group environment, see where the overlaps are, where there's confusion, and let's get clarity around what.
Outcomes, each individual owns, and you'll not only see relief for you, but this is a great exercise for role clarity as well. Okay guys, let's go do the work.
Thank you for listening to the Liberating Teams podcast. If this episode hit home for you, don't forget to share it with another leader. Or if you've got 10 seconds, drop a five star review and it would mean the world to me so we can liberate more teams together. And if you try something for today's episode, come tell me how it went.
DM me on Instagram over at Liberating Teams, and I'd love to chat more about it. Now. Let's go change the world of work. One liberated team at a time.
