What is Delegating and Why Is It a Good Thing?

Running live operations, I had days where many things broke at once, in different locations on the ship. I could not physically be in three places. One of those moments in the beginning of my leadership was when delegation stopped being a dry concept for me — the turning point toward actually embracing a healthy, helpful practice. In that very moment it was the only thing standing between "handled" and "disaster." In that moment, I picked from the many emergencies the one that could not go without my presence, and sent a few of my team to the "smaller" ones. In my mind I was not delegating. I was deferring — postponing those other fires until I could get to them myself. I felt like I was cheating, lining the other fires up in time, still planning to fix them myself, one after another.

I put out the biggest “fire” and then went back one by one to the others, in order of urgency, to fix or recover what needed fixing or recovering. That's what you do in hospitality, in 24/7 guest-facing service, in one of the most competitive industries. To my surprise, the world didn't even notice I had not been there, and the problems were solved without me, with minimum disturbance. There was nothing left for me to achieve. I could just polish and add a bit of fine touch on top, as service recovery. But in essence the job was done. I was so surprised! I was in disbelief, humbled, slapped in the face by reality... The house did not burn down without me! The world kept spinning!

After the crisis, we sat down to look at what had happened — why it did, what we'd do differently if it happens again, what we could do to prevent it, what couldn't have gone any other way. As you do.

The result was good, and what stayed with me wasn't the adrenaline — it was the relief of everyone having pulled through together, and the elation of a great and unexpected victory. And it was a feeling attached to togetherness, trust and teamwork; it was not a feeling in the void.

I wanted to keep that feeling every day, not just when we "prevailed, survived, made it." That's when it clicked: that's what delegating actually is. It's not a separate technique. It's just another word for working together.

Most first-time managers never get that forcing moment. Nothing breaks badly enough to make the old ways impossible. So they keep doing the job for and over their team instead of with their team, and call it managing.

You may still be the best individual contributor on your team. You got promoted because you were good at the work. A year in, you're still the one who does the hardest version of it because watching someone do it slower, or differently, or wrong, feels more expensive than just doing it yourself.

It isn't. That's your job now. Every hour you spend doing the work yourself is an hour you didn't spend building someone else to do it. That's not investment — and investment is a key part of any strategy: investing money, time, effort. It's all investment, and it pays off in dividends, and it grows.

What delegating actually means

Delegation should not be an emergency procedure. It's a healthy, everyday practice — and maybe the word "delegation" itself is part of the problem. It sounds like handing off a burden or a task. Call it what it is: working together, deliberately, all the time, not only when the building is on fire.

The research agrees with what I felt on that ship: Google's own study of what makes teams effective (Project Aristotle) found psychological safety and trust mattered more than individual talent. And Gallup, studying 143 Inc. 500 CEOs, found that those with high delegator talent generated 33% more revenue than those without it — while roughly three quarters of the entrepreneurs they studied had limited-to-low delegator talent.

(How to actually build that day to day — for first-time managers, team rotations, whatever your setup — is a separate piece I will post soon. This one's about why it's worth doing at all.)

So why haven’t you embraced delegating yet?

You give instructions instead of context. "Why" is one of the secret weapons nobody taught you.

On a ship, in the middle of a crisis, I didn't have time to explain everything, so I learned the version of "why" that takes ten seconds and saves an hour: what we're actually protecting, what happens if this goes wrong, and what "good" looks and feels like here. People who understand that fill in gaps correctly on their own. People who only get the task guess wrong and come back with the same challenges. People who understand one scenario extrapolate and improve on their own.

You think delegating means not taking part. It doesn't — it means handing someone a real outcome, real authority over how they get there, and a safety net to help them practice and perfect. Dumping the task is not delegating, and that is another thing I want you to leave here with.

You think you need to feel ready, or fully confident in your team, in order to delegate. The confidence in yourself and in others comes after the many small reps — after trial and error, after failures, adjustments and growth. Start by delegating something that matters but won't sink you if it goes sideways — that's how the good judgment and trust get built, not by waiting for certainty.

The leaders I coach aren't usually missing information about how to delegate. They're missing the motivation to embrace it, or the forcing moment that leaves them without a choice — the night with three fires in three locations.

Coaching can reveal the needed motivation or can simulate just that moment, without the actual fire.