Expand Your Leadership & Influence? Expand Your Delegation!
The Counterintuitive Leadership Move That Frees You to Personally Scale
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Expand Your Leadership & Influence? Expand Your Delegation!
“You can’t 10X your influence by doing 10X more work. You have to 10X your leverage.”
If you’re a founder, CEO, CFO, COO, or any other leader carrying real operational weight, there’s a moment you’ve already hit or soon will…
You realize your personal capacity has become the limiting factor for your team’s growth. Have you hit that wall yet? I know many of my clients have… or should I say “had”. We’ve worked through this very important PlayBook together and they’ve come out the other side.
The firehose of decisions, escalations, and reviews keeps coming. You start each day in reaction mode - usually on email or Slack - power through in “get shit done” mode…and leave the day feeling productive… and yet you are vaguely unsatisfied.
Why? Because you eventually realize you are still the glue holding it all together. And you tell your coach something along the lines of “I’m the only one who can really get this stuff done”. That’s actually a self-fulfilling, prophetic lie.
You can’t scale when you have your hands full of glue. That stuck feeling? Yeah, you aren’t washing your hands. Moreover, you haven’t handed somebody else the glue to see how they do it.
Want to expand your leadership and influence? Then DELEGATE!
You scale by becoming the architect of the systems that produce the flywheel of ownership and accountability.
Here’s What Delegation IS NOT
It’s not simply offloading
It’s not outsourcing
It’s definitely not abdicating
Delegation IS a Conscious Design Discipline
A system for creating influence by assigning ownership to others
Letting others make decisions and trusting they’ll take the ball and move it forward
Maybe not as fast as you. Or as efficient as you… but the ball and their personal careers move forward and level up
Allowing you to level up to the higher level challenges you’ve been avoiding by comfortably drowning in less strategic and more tactical “stuff” you are getting done
A current popular icebreaker at small group events these days is “2 Lies and a Truth”. We just did this fun game at a Stifel CFO event and also my own Bay Area CFO Group that’s forming. For this post, I’m going to borrow the concept but make it “3 Lies… and the Truth”.
The Paradox of Influence: The 3 Lies
Most execs don’t delegate more because they believe one of these three lies:
“It’s faster if I just do it myself.”
“No one else will do it the way I would.”
“I can’t afford a mistake on this one.”
You’ve told these lies before. I used to tell myself these lies.
Those that worked with me at Mozilla knew I loved logical fallacies and the myriad of ways people manipulate and distort the truth.
Those 3 Lies? They are “False Choices”.
Every time you repeat a task that someone else could own, you are actually signaling that you’re the bottleneck.
What’s worse than that as a leader? You are keeping your future leaders from growing.
What’s worse than that? You are keeping yourself from growing and influencing in the larger, more strategic executive decision rooms.
Leadership Expansion = Delegation Expansion
Want to expand your influence?
Stop measuring your value by how many things you get done daily.
Start measuring it by how many people you give ownership to make high-quality decisions without you.
Change your metric and you’ll change your leadership multiplier.
Ahem… (I’m clearing my throat)… and no, Ai didn’t write this… but I’m having a ton of fun with this post in my own writing style way…
”That’s how every great leader eventually graduates from Operator to Architect.”
Delegation Framework: 5 Powerful Questions to Rewire Your Leadership
Use this PlayBook for your next 1:1, dept/staff meeting, or your next team offsite. Oh yeah, don’t just read this, get out a notebook and write down the answers to these questions! (Note: My long time readers and clients already recognize my “powerful questions”, “frameworks & playbooks”, and “write it down”)
Write down the answers to these questions… in your notebook… go ahead… I’ll wait.
What am I doing that no really no longer requires my fingerprints?
What am I holding onto because of fear vs growth?
Fear - another favorite topic of mine = “False Evidence Appearing Real”
What would actually break if I left this task entirely in someone else’s hands?
Scorecard the actual risk - come on now - be objective.
Is it really that bad? Be 100% objectively honest… not subjectively fearful.
What decisions do I want others making without me 6 months from now?
Now we are talking future roadmap
Who specifically are we talking about?
What specific activity are they now actually owning? (3-6 months from now?)
What trust, expectation setting, or coaching is missing for me to actually delegate to this person?
Why am I not delegating this “thing” tomorrow? Next week? Why will it really take me a month to delegate it? Really?
Ready? Now go take your notes and have the actual conversation with the “Who” about the specific “What” and “When”. If you aren’t willing to do that, at a bare minimum take the time to at least draft the email communicating all this. Even better, put it all down in a shared Google Doc. The best part, once you write it down, these drafts will be waiting for you when you are truly ready.
Hard hitting bottom line reality? If you don’t take action after all this “figuring it out” - then you are simply doing that procrastination thing. You will continue to be “stuck” because you will still have that glue on your hands we discussed earlier.
Delegation is a Leadership Accelerator and a Dual-Mode Investment… It is Absolutely Not a Cost.
The best leaders aren’t “less involved”. They design their involvement and influence.
They create rituals of review, feedback, and trust.
They give one of the most valuable things they have in their arsenal to someone else. That “One Thing” = Ownership.
You win by creating space for yourself
“They” win by receiving their own expanded influence and expanded leadership growth.
We talk about “Give to Get” in our network circles all the time in the Operators Guild and the CFO Circle (Founders Circle Capital). Delegation is another form of Give-To-Get.
Ultimately, the leaders who master this concept build great teams. These teams trust each other, have each other’s backs, and outperform all other teams.
My Personal Story: Delegation from the CFO Seat
As a CFO at multiple scaling companies, I’ve learned these lessons the hard way… and told these same lies… until I stopped.
In the early days of Mozilla, I signed every single check and reviewed every single contract. Then the systems I created (and the company) began outgrowing itself and outgrowing me. Nothing was scaling and everything was breaking. I was becoming the bottleneck. For an operator like me who highly valued fast, easy, efficient, and productive, the very idea of being a bottleneck was mind numbing.
So I started designing systems to replace “me”:
With the help of my team and new systems and vendors, I designed clear decision and approval permissions (signature authorities)
We designed new escalation systems (e.g. security and IT incidence response protocols)
We designed new confidence scoring and risk tagging for annual planning and new investment decisions
Yes, and an actual system (Biztera) - we called it “CASA” internally. We built the equivalent, and dare I say better, Zip 3 years before Zip even existed.
That’s when my leadership and influence began to grow at Mozilla. I now had way more time to be a partner to my executive peers and to think more strategically while my team was energized by their own new challenges of being the former “me” in various areas.
Bottom Lines:
If you want to expand your leadership… expand your delegation.
Expand your influence as part of your overall system design/architecture.
Because the people you delegate to today will become the future leaders of tomorrow, and they’ll always remember you for giving them the opportunity.