Letting Go (Without Letting It Fall Apart)
by Ashley Graham-Wilcox
I'll just come right out with it: I am terrible at delegating.
Maybe I once had potential for it, but after so many years of working in small non-profits where there just aren't people to hand things off to and "other duties as assigned" is a way of life, I got very good at just doing the thing myself. Usually well…and usually at the last possible minute.
It's not that I want or need to maintain control of everything. For me, it's more that I rarely have the time or space to slow down long enough to explain something before I've already gone ahead and done it.
My skills are in getting things done, and bringing perspectives into focus. I remember the comment someone made in passing in March, the email I meant to circle back to, the workshop idea that suddenly makes sense next to a totally unrelated one. I am not always good at connecting the dots externally. This skill is also completely invisible to anyone I haven't told.
That doesn't mean I can't hand things off. It means the handoff takes a different kind of time than the task itself: not time to do the thing, but time to stop and get what's in my head into someone else's. But I’m trying!
So, whether it's a new volunteer or a new team member, learn with me how to more effectively delegate.
A few things I'm trying (imperfectly):
Write it down once, even when it's faster not to. The instinct is to just do the thing because explaining it feels like it'll take longer. It won't — not the fourth time you do it! The first time you hand something off, take the extra ten minutes to write down how you did it. Future-you, and whoever's picking it up, will thank you.
Voice memo it if you can't type it. If you think faster than you write (I do), talk it out instead. Record yourself walking through a task like you're explaining it to a person standing next to you. It's faster than a doc, and it captures the why, not just the steps — which is usually the part that gets lost.
Give context, not just instructions. The task is rarely just the task. It's the task plus who it's for, why it matters this way and not another way, and what "done well" looks like. Skip that part and you'll get technically correct work that still isn't right.
Start small, and let trust build the old-fashioned way. You don't hand someone the keys on day one. You hand them something low-stakes, see how they handle it without you hovering, and hand them a little more next time.
Build in a check-in, not a check-up. There's a difference between "how's it going, anything you're stuck on" and standing over someone's shoulder (even remotely). One builds trust. The other erodes it, on both sides.
Block the time before you need it, not when you're already behind. The handoff always loses to whatever's on fire that day, which essentially means it never happens. If I actually want to delegate something, it has to go on the calendar before the deadline is breathing down my neck; otherwise "I'll explain it later" turns into "I'll just do it myself, again."
I don't have this figured out. I'm still the person who'll stay up late finishing something I could've handed off a week ago. But one of my favorite parts of this work is seeing someone take a task and do it in a way I never would have — a new angle, a skill I don't have, a take that's better than mine. The barrier was never that I wanted it done my way. It's that I have to actually make the time to hand it off before I can find out what someone else would do with it.
