Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Stop Solving Everything Themselves
Transcript
- Lucas: So you've been a manager for maybe three months now, and you're drowning. Your calendar is packed with back to back meetings where people ask you to unblock them. You're answering Slack messages at 9 PM. And the weird thing is — you actually feel a little proud of it. Like, 'I'm the one everyone depends on.' Luna: That's the hero manager trap, right? It feels good to be needed, but it's a terrible long-term strategy. Lucas: Exactly. I want to talk today about why new managers fall into this pattern — and how to get out of it. Because the goal of a manager isn't to be the smartest person in the room. It's to make everyone else smarter. Luna: There's a great line I heard once: 'If you're the one solving all the problems, you're not a manager — you're a bottleneck.' Lucas: Yeah, that's exactly the framing. And I want to ground this in a real case. I was talking to a friend who got promoted to engineering director at a mid-sized SaaS company last year. She told me she was getting over 40 direct Slack DMs a day — questions about prioritization, technical decisions, even which vendor to use for office supplies. She thought this was normal. She thought it meant she was doing her job. Luna: Forty DMs a day? That's unsustainable. How long did it take before she realized something had to change? Lucas: About six months. She hit a wall — she was working 60-hour weeks and her team was still complaining they couldn't move fast enough. She came to me and said, 'I've created a monster. I'm the single point of failure.' And I think that's the moment a lot of new managers have: the painful recognition that your expertise is now your biggest liability. Luna: Because you got promoted for being great at the work. But now the work is different. Lucas: Right. You were an individual contributor who solved hard problems. That's what got you noticed. So your instinct is to keep solving. But as a manager, every time you solve a problem for someone, you've stolen a learning opportunity from them. You've also taught them that the fastest path to an answer is to come to you. Luna: So how do you rewire that instinct? What's the first concrete step? Lucas: There's a technique I like called 'three questions before you escalate.' The idea is simple: before a direct report brings a problem to you, they have to answer three things. One: what is the problem, exactly — not the symptom, but the root cause. Two: what are at least two possible solutions you've already considered? Three: which one do you recommend and why? Luna: So you're not saying don't bring me problems. You're saying bring me problems with thinking attached. Lucas: Exactly. And you have to enforce it consistently. If someone comes to you and says, 'I have a problem, what should I do?' — you don't answer. You say, 'Great question. Take a stab at those three questions and come back to me in 30 minutes.' After a few times, they internalize the framework. Luna: But what if the problem is genuinely urgent? Like a production outage or a client about to churn. Do you still make them go through three questions? Lucas: That's a fair pushback. For actual fires, you need a different protocol. I'd say you handle the immediate triage together, but then you schedule a 15-minute debrief afterwards where you walk through the three questions retroactively. That way you're still building the muscle, just not in real time. Luna: That makes sense. I've also seen managers use a 'decision journal' — where they write down every significant decision they made and why. It helps them see patterns in what they're actually deciding vs what they should delegate. Lucas: Yeah, I love that. There's actually research from McKinsey in 2025 that looked at delegation practices across 200 companies. They found that managers who systematically delegate — meaning they have a clear framework for what stays and what goes — improve team productivity by 22 percent on average. And their own burnout risk drops by nearly a third. Luna: Twenty-two percent is huge. And the burnout piece — that's something we don't talk about enough. New managers think they have to grind, but the data says that's exactly the wrong move. Lucas: Look, I want to pause here for a second, because we're talking about a topic that actually connects to something I think about a lot with this show. We deliberately don't run ads on New Manager Conversations. Not because ads are bad — but because we want every episode to be exactly as long as it needs to be, without any interruption. And we want to keep the conversation honest. Luna: Yeah, that's something I really appreciate. It means we can go deep on a specific case without having to cut away for a sponsor read. Lucas: Exactly. And the way that works is through listeners who find value in what we do and decide to support it. If that's you, there's a simple way to help — it's buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's it. No tiers, no perks, no pressure. Just a way to keep this thing ad-free and focused on the content. Luna: And to come back to the topic — one of the hardest parts of delegating is knowing what's safe to hand off. How do you decide which problems are delegation-ready? Lucas: Right. So there's a useful concept called the 'stretch zone versus the panic zone.' The stretch zone is where a direct report has maybe 60 to 70 percent of the skills needed to solve a problem — so they'll be challenged, but with a little coaching they can get there. The panic zone is where they have less than 30 percent — they're lost and it'll damage their confidence. Luna: So the sweet spot is stretch zone. But how do you calibrate that for each person? Everyone's zone is different. Lucas: You calibrate by watching how they handle the three-questions framework. If they come back with decent answers and a reasonable recommendation, they're probably in stretch zone. If they come back with nothing or they're panicked, you might need to scaffold more. The key is to gradually increase the complexity over time. Luna: I want to go back to the idea of the hero manager. Because I think there's also an emotional component — a fear that if you stop being the problem-solver, you'll lose your value to the team. Lucas: That's real. And it's especially common for new managers who were promoted from within. You used to be the person everyone came to for answers. Now you're supposed to redirect them. It can feel like you're abdicating your role. But the truth is the opposite — your new role is to build a system where problems get solved without you. Luna: There's a great example from the same friend you mentioned earlier. She started tracking how many DMs she answered in a day — and then set a goal to reduce that number by 10 percent each week. Within a month, she went from 40 to about 15. Lucas: And what did she do with that reclaimed time? Luna: She started doing more strategic work — thinking about team structure, mentoring her skip-levels, and actually taking a lunch break. She said her team also started solving problems faster because they stopped waiting for her approval. Lucas: That's the flywheel. The more you delegate effectively, the more your team builds confidence, and the less they need you for low-level decisions. And that frees you up to focus on the stuff that actually requires a manager — like setting direction, removing systemic obstacles, and developing people. Luna: So if someone listening is three months into their first management role and feeling overwhelmed, what's the one thing you'd tell them to do this week? Lucas: Pick the top three recurring questions you answer every week. Write them down. Then, for each one, figure out what framework or guideline you could create that would let someone answer it themselves. It could be a simple checklist or a decision tree. Share that with your team. And then enforce that they use it before coming to you. Luna: That's concrete and doable. I also think it helps to set an expectation with your team that this isn't about you being lazy — it's about them growing. Frame it as 'I want you to own this decision because you're capable.' Lucas: Exactly. And if they push back — if they say, 'But you're so much faster at this' — you say, 'Yes, today I am. But if you do it three times, you'll be just as fast. And then we'll both have more capacity.' Luna: I think that's a good place to leave it. One small change this week — pick three problems, build a framework, and stop being the bottleneck. Lucas: Yeah. The goal isn't to do less work. It's to do more of the work that only you can do. And that starts with letting go of the rest.