“You’ll Be Great at This” Never Asks If They Want It

Season 3 · Episode 5. You hand someone a piece of work. You know what they can do with it, and you say something like “You’ll be great at this.” Did you ask how they feel about taking it on? “Learn to delegate” is good advice: you stop being the bottleneck every decision waits on, and your people grow by taking on real work. Most of us hear it as “hand off tasks,” and the handoff often never says which decisions are theirs. In this episode I tell the story of a team I took over earlier in my career, where I judged only what each person could do and assumed every one of them wanted the work. Then I talk through the three lines I use now before every handoff: what the person can already do on this piece of work, how they feel about taking it on, asked before I share my own view, and the handoff said as a task or as “This is yours,” with its decisions named. In The Tao of Coaching, Max Landsberg has a leader judge skill and will for each piece of work, and the way I ask is adapted from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead. I try the lines on a customer survey and a restaurant’s fall dishes, and the episode closes on a Monday test for your next handoff. Episode 5 of Where Decisions Break (the Decision Charter and the AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix). Chapters: 00:00 The handoff problem 01:07 Task vs. responsibility 03:12 Skill, will, and asking 05:54 The three-line handoff 09:27 Making it stick Read the essay: https://theautisticleader.ai/writing/... Subscribe: https://theautisticleader.substack.com Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: 0XHGVG8SLNJWZQSY, DAGMGGXLT1YHYYNX