The Lie We Tell Ourselves: ‘I’m Too Busy to Delegate Properly’
Let’s be honest. How many times this week have you said, or even thought, “I’m just too busy right now to train Sarah on this properly, I’ll just do it myself”?
I’ve been there. We all have. When the pressure is on—that looming deadline, that unhappy client, that stack of reports—the temptation to just grab the reins and sprint to the finish line ourselves is overwhelming. It feels efficient in the moment. It feels like control.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve learned from years in leadership trenches: That moment of self-sufficiency is actually the most expensive decision you make all week. It’s the quiet saboteur of true management.
The Manager’s Trap: Trading Time for Scale
Think of management not as doing the work, but as building the engine that does the work. When you constantly take back tasks you should have delegated, you are essentially pulling the spark plugs out of your engine because you want to adjust the timing belt yourself. Sure, you get that one piece done faster, but the whole system sputters.
We confuse activity with impact. Being busy feels important. It looks good on a status report. But what is the measurable output of your busyness? Usually, it’s just more busyness for you, and stagnation for your team.
The Hidden Costs of Hoarding Work:
- Stunted Growth: Your high-potential employee remains an executor, never becoming a decision-maker, because you never gave them the chance to own the full cycle.
- Burnout on Repeat: You become the bottleneck. Everything slows down waiting for your sign-off or your intervention, leading to stress for you and resentment from your team.
- Cultural Complacency: If the leader is always swooping in to fix things, the implicit message is, “I don’t trust you to handle complexity.” That’s poison to corporate culture.
The Antidote: The 20-Minute Investment
The solution isn’t to suddenly have more hours in the day. It’s to change how we view the investment of time upfront. I call this the ’20-Minute Rule of Empowerment.’
When a new task arises, resist the urge to just own it. Instead, ask yourself: Can I spend 20 minutes showing someone else how to own this, even if it means they’ll do it 70% as well as I would today?
That initial 20 minutes—spent coaching, clarifying expectations, maybe even stepping back and saying, “Talk me through your first three steps”—feels slow. It feels like you’re losing ground. But that 20 minutes buys you back hours, days, maybe weeks, of your own capacity down the line.
Show, Don’t Just Tell: A Quick Story. I had a director who insisted on writing all the initial drafts for executive presentations. He was faster, he said. We implemented a structure where, before he touched the keyboard, he had to spend 15 minutes sketching out the narrative flow with a junior analyst. The first few times, the analyst was slow. But within a month? That analyst was delivering presentation structures that were cleaner and more strategic than the director’s rushed first drafts. The director freed up his strategic thinking time, and the analyst got a career-making skill.
Redefining ‘Good Management’
If your calendar is crammed with tasks that someone else on your payroll could, or should, be doing, you’re not a manager; you’re a highly paid individual contributor wearing a leadership title. A truly successful manager creates capacity everywhere but in their own chair.
Stop letting ‘busy’ become an excuse for abdication of your primary role: developing the talent around you. The next time you feel that familiar surge of urgency telling you to just handle it, take a deep breath. Find the person who needs the challenge, offer the 20 minutes of focused guidance, and then—this is the hard part—walk away and let them learn in the arena. That’s where real leadership happens.
