02 - Amy learns about delegating

The document she'd shared with the team — "Here's what matters" — got a few thumbs-up reactions in Slack. No pushback, which felt like progress after the weeks she'd just had.

Now she needed people to actually do something with it.

Delegating had been a whole module in the New Manager Training course. She remembered most of it: assign work that matches people's strengths, look for development opportunities, don't hold everything yourself. The trainer had called it "one of the highest-leverage things a new manager can do." Yep. Good idea.

She spent an evening going through the list of things on her plate and mapping them against what she knew about each person. Marcus was detail-oriented, so she'd give him the compliance tracking work that had been sitting on her desk for two weeks. Priya was ambitious and had mentioned wanting to grow — she'd get the vendor summary report, a little more visible than what she usually handled. Darnell was steady and experienced — she'd assign him the cross-department coordination piece she found most draining.

Now she felt organized. Delegating would get her back on track.  She sent each of them a message the following morning with a brief description of what she needed and when she needed it.

The replies were polite. Sure. Got it. Will do.

By the end of the week, she had Priya's vendor report, which was thorough and well-written and also not quite what Eleanor had asked for. Darnell had started on the cross-department coordination but hit a wall when the other department's lead didn't respond to him, which he mentioned to Amy in passing at the end of a team meeting. Marcus had the compliance tracking well in hand, and that, at least, felt fine.

She sent Priya a note with corrections. She emailed the other department's lead herself to get Darnell moving. And when Priya’s second version of the vendor report arrived, Amy stayed late finishing the vendor report to her satisfaction.

She was doing more work than before she'd delegated anything.

She'd done exactly what the training suggested: matched work to people, created development opportunities, distributed load. 

The advice wasn't wrong. It just hadn't solved anything, because the real problem was still sitting underneath it. She'd been thinking about delegation as a way to clear her own desk. Looking down at the notepad in front of her, Amy noticed that she had drawn a box with an arrow pointing outward, away from it. She drew a big “X” through it. 

Eleanor's words came back to her. They exist to help you get things done.

And she saw it clearly now: everything she had sent off to others was stuff she'd wanted off her plate. None of it touched the things that actually mattered to Eleanor. The things that mattered were still sitting right in front of her, untouched, because she'd spent her energy redistributing the wrong work.

She'd shared her goals. She hadn't connected anyone to them.

"Tomorrow," she said to no one, "we start over." She turned out the light and headed home.