FIELD GUIDE NO. 5
Delegation
Letting Go of the Work That Got You Here
You already know you should delegate more. Everyone’s told you. And yet here you are — reviewing the deck one more time, sitting in the meeting you don’t need to attend, doing work someone on your team could do at 70% of your level. This guide starts where the usual advice doesn’t: delegation isn’t a time-management problem. It’s an identity problem. Five practices to put the work down, a diagnostic to find where you keep picking it back up, and one real handoff to make within 48 hours.
Every practice, taken apart.
Each of the five practices follows the same anatomy: the pattern I see most in coaching, what builds it and what erodes it, how to know it’s working — and how to know it isn’t — the coaching questions that expose where you take the work back, one experiment to run within 48 hours, and a 30-day build. Plus the real rooms where each one shows up: the calendar, the meeting, the line at your door.
IDENTITY, NOT TIME MANAGEMENT.
THE 70% RULE.
BUILD THE BENCH.
The reason you’re still doing the work isn’t your calendar. It’s that something with your name on it shipping at 70% doesn’t feel good enough. The guide names the three beliefs that keep you below altitude — and what each one is actually costing.
Their 70% today is the only road to their 100% next year. Learn to let work ship at good enough for the task — without letting go of the standard, and without hovering until you’ve taken it back.
Done right, delegation isn’t offloading — it’s development. The bench you build is how your people grow, and it’s the case for your next role. Nobody promotes the leader no one can replace.
How to use it.
This is a handoff, not a purge. Don’t hand off half your calendar on Monday — find the practice where you take the work back, read that one entry, run the experiment, and make one real handoff. One practice. 48 hours. Come back. Then the next one.
Part of The Right Altitude Field Guides — see the full series or start with the flagship The Right Altitude