Most founders say they want to delegate more. Very few have written down what they're keeping. Start there, and the rest gets much easier to hand over.
By Ines Calder
Almost every founder I meet in a first call says some version of the same thing: everything still ends up on my desk. They've tried delegating. They've hired good people. And still, by Thursday, there's a queue outside the door.
The usual advice is to let go of more. I think that's backwards. The founders who delegate well don't start by deciding what to give away. They start by writing down, precisely, what they're keeping. Once that list exists, everything not on it belongs to someone else by default, and the arguments get much shorter.
Why delegation keeps bouncing back
Here's the pattern I see most. You hand a decision to a manager: pricing a job, hiring a junior, agreeing a supplier's terms. You don't say where the limits are, because you trust them and it feels awkward to spell it out. They make a call. It's not quite the call you'd have made, so you adjust it, gently. They notice. Next time, to be safe, they check with you first.
Six months later you're complaining that nobody takes responsibility, and they're telling their partner you never let go of anything. You're both right. The decision didn't bounce back because they weren't capable. It bounced back because nobody knew where its edges were.
Three kinds of decision
I ask clients to sort every recurring decision in the business into one of three piles.
- Theirs. The manager decides and gets on with it. You might hear about it at the Monday huddle, or you might not.
- Ours. The manager recommends, you talk, and one of you decides. Usually it's them, with your agreement. These are the decisions where you add something, not the ones where you'd simply like to know.
- Mine. You decide, having heard from whoever you need to. This pile should be short enough to fit on an index card.
The first time founders do this, the "mine" pile has forty things in it. That's fine. It's the honest starting point, and it tells you exactly where the queue outside your door comes from.
If your “mine” list doesn't fit on an index card, you haven't got a leadership team. You've got a waiting room.
What should stay with you
Every business is different, but after ten years the list of decisions that genuinely belong to the CEO is remarkably consistent. In a company of 100 to 1,500 people it's usually these five:
- Who is on the exec team, and who leaves it. Not every hire, only the people who report to you.
- Where the business is going: the three-year picture and this year's targets. Your team should shape both, but the final call is yours.
- Anything that bets the business. Borrowing above an agreed limit, an acquisition, a new site or country, a contract that would make one customer more than a quarter of turnover.
- The lines you won't cross. How customers are treated, what behaviour gets someone dismissed, what the business will and won't do for money.
- Your own role. What you do each week, and what you've stopped doing. Nobody else can decide this for you, although your team will have views.
That's it. Pricing, most hiring, suppliers, operations, complaints, discounts and nearly all spending belong in the other two piles, with limits.
A decision-rights list you can copy
Limits are what make "theirs" feel safe, for you and for them. Here's a trimmed version of the list one of my clients, a restaurant and pub group with 34 sites, agreed with its exec team. The amounts are theirs; yours will differ.
| Decision | Whose | Limit or condition |
|---|---|---|
| Menu changes | Theirs | Operations board, within the agreed gross margin for each brand |
| Hiring a general manager | Theirs | Operations director, within the year's headcount budget |
| Local promotions | Theirs | General manager, up to 15% off, agreed with the area manager |
| Spending on an existing site | Theirs | Operations director up to £75,000; over that, ours |
| Supplier contracts | Theirs | Up to £250,000 a year; over that, ours |
| Goodwill on a complaint | Theirs | General manager, up to £500; CEO told if it reaches the press |
| Moving an opening date | Ours | Operations director recommends, CEO agrees within two working days |
| Dismissing a senior manager | Ours | Director decides with HR advice; CEO told before, not after |
| Signing a lease on a new site | Mine | With the property and finance directors' recommendation |
| Exec team appointments | Mine | After the team has met the candidate |
Notice what the list doesn't do. It doesn't describe how to make each decision. That's the manager's job, and the moment you start writing procedures into it, you've taken the decision back.
How to hand it over
Write it with your team, not for them. Put a first draft in front of your senior people and ask them where they'd move things. They'll often want less than you expect, not more. That's useful information.
Start with the decisions you care least about. Nobody learns to decide on your most precious customer. Hand over the supplier renewals first, then the smaller spending decisions, then the bigger ones.
When they get one wrong, don't take it back. Review it. Ask what they knew at the time and what they'd do differently. If you overrule, you've just told them, and everyone watching, that the list was decoration.
Review the list every quarter. Limits should rise as trust does. At the restaurant group, the operations director's limit on site spending started at £25,000 and reached £75,000 within a year.
The fortnight afterwards
I'll warn you now: for about two weeks after you do this properly, you'll feel slightly useless. People will stop knocking. Decisions will get made that you only hear about on Monday. Some of them will be different from what you'd have done, and most of those will turn out fine.
One CEO I work with, who runs a software company, made one rule: her chief product officer decides everything on the roadmap except pricing. It took her an afternoon to agree and about six weeks to believe. It also took twelve hours a week off her diary, and the company shipped faster, because work no longer sat in a queue waiting for her.
That's the point of the list. Not to do less, but to spend your week on the handful of decisions that really are yours, and to do those properly.
Ines
