Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / The Delegation Trap New Managers Fall Into
Transcript
- Lucas: So you've been a manager for about six weeks now. You're still answering emails at 10 p.m., you're the one rewriting the presentation deck because it's not quite right, and your team seems perfectly happy to let you do it. Does that sound familiar? Luna: It sounds like the delegation trap. And I think almost every new manager I've ever talked to has been through some version of it. Lucas: Right. And it's not just anecdotal. Harvard Business Review did a study a few years back that followed first-time managers over their first year. They found that 67 percent of them struggled to shift from doing the work themselves to enabling others to do it. That's two out of three. Luna: And the interesting thing is, it's not laziness or incompetence. It's usually the opposite—they got promoted because they were really good at the work. Letting go feels like a loss of identity. Lucas: Exactly. You were the star individual contributor. The one who could be counted on to deliver. And now your job is to make sure someone else delivers, and the natural instinct is to hover or just do it yourself because it's faster. Luna: Faster in the moment, but way slower over time. You end up as a bottleneck, and your team never builds its own muscle. Lucas: Let's make this concrete. I was talking to a friend of mine—she's a marketing manager at a mid-sized B2B software company. She got promoted in January, and for the first four months she was still personally writing the email drip campaigns, designing the landing pages, even pulling the analytics herself. She had a team of three, but she wasn't delegating anything meaningful. Luna: What changed? Lucas: Her mentor gave her a simple framework. Before you assign any piece of work, ask yourself three questions. First: does this task build a skill that my team member needs to develop? Second: is the outcome something I can accept being imperfect on the first try? And third: does this task free me up to do something only I can do—like stakeholder communication or strategic planning? Luna: That's really good. That third question is the one most new managers skip. They don't ask what only they should be doing. They just ask what they can offload. Lucas: Right. Delegation isn't dumping. It's capability building. And that shifts the whole mindset. Instead of thinking 'I need to get this off my plate,' you think 'I need to put this on their plate so they grow.' Luna: And the research backs that up. A study out of the Center for Creative Leadership found that managers who framed delegation as development rather than task distribution had teams that were 30 percent more engaged after six months. Lucas: That's a huge number. Thirty percent. And I think the resistance to delegating comes from a very human place. You don't want to be seen as the boss who just hands off the grunt work. You want to be in the trenches with your team. Luna: But here's the counterintuitive part: your team doesn't want you in the trenches with them. They want you to be their advocate, their coach, their shield from the noise. When you're doing their work, you're not doing your work. Lucas: And you're actually making them feel like you don't trust them. That's the part that hurts. I've seen teams where the new manager is so hands-on that the team feels infantilized. They start to disengage because why bother trying if the boss is going to redo everything? Luna: So what does good delegation look like in practice? Let's walk through her example. She was writing the email drips. What should she have done instead? Lucas: First, she should have sat down with the junior copywriter on her team—let's call him Mike—and said, 'Here's the objective for this campaign. Here's the audience. I want you to draft the first version. I'll give you feedback once, and then you own the final version.' That one thing would have built Mike's skill, saved her hours, and sent a message that she trusts him. Luna: And the analytics piece—she should have taught her team member how to pull the reports and interpret them. That's not just delegation, that's upskilling. Lucas: Exactly. And the third question—what only she can do. In her case, it was the quarterly review with the VP of marketing. That's a strategic conversation about budget, priorities, and cross-functional alignment. No one else on her team could have done that. And she was spending her time on email formatting instead. Luna: It's a classic opportunity cost problem. The new manager is spending their highest-value hours on the lowest-value tasks because those tasks feel familiar and safe. Lucas: Safe and immediate. You get the dopamine hit of crossing something off a to-do list. Strategic work doesn't give you that. It's fuzzy and long-term. Luna: I want to talk about the guilt piece. A lot of new managers feel guilty when they're not doing the 'real work.' They feel like they're coasting or that they've lost their edge. Lucas: Yeah, that guilt is real. And I think it's especially hard if you were promoted from within the team. Your former peers see you walking around while they're heads-down, and you feel like you have to justify your existence by proving you can still do the work. Luna: But the irony is, the best way to prove your value is to make your team successful. If they're producing great work, your value is obvious. You don't need to prove anything by doing their jobs. Lucas: Look, if today's episode was useful to you and you want to keep it ad-free, buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo helps. It's a small thing that makes a big difference for us. Luna: Yeah, it really does. A few listeners chipping in means we can keep these conversations going without any sponsors. We appreciate that. Lucas: So back to the guilt. One thing that helped my friend was a simple reframe. Instead of thinking 'I'm not doing the work,' she started thinking 'I'm doing the work of building a team that can do the work.' That's a different job entirely. Luna: And it's a harder job. Honestly, I think delegation is one of the hardest skills to learn as a new manager. Because it requires patience, trust, and the ability to tolerate short-term imperfection for long-term gain. Lucas: And the real kicker is, you have to be explicit about it. You can't just assume your team knows you're delegating for their growth. You have to say it. 'I'm giving you this because I think you can handle it and I want you to develop this skill.' Luna: That transparency changes the dynamic. Instead of feeling dumped on, the team member feels invested in. It's a completely different emotional experience. Lucas: There's also a practical side. Delegation without structure fails. You need to set clear expectations: what does success look like, what's the deadline, what's the level of autonomy, and how will we check in? Luna: Some managers use the 'three buckets' approach. Full autonomy—you own it, just keep me informed. Guided autonomy—check in at milestones. And close supervision—I need to see drafts. Being explicit about which bucket a task falls into avoids confusion. Lucas: That's a great framework. And it scales. As the team member proves themselves, you can move them from close supervision to full autonomy. That's the goal—build a team that doesn't need you for the day-to-day. Luna: What about the reverse? What if you delegate something and it goes badly? The team member misses the deadline or produces something low quality. How do you handle that without just taking the task back? Lucas: That's the hardest part. The instinct is to grab it back and fix it yourself. But that undermines the whole process. Instead, you do a postmortem. 'What went wrong? What would you do differently? How can I support you next time?' You treat it as a learning moment, not a failure. Luna: And you have to be willing to accept that the first few times, the output might not be as good as if you'd done it yourself. That's the investment. The fifth time, it'll be as good or better. But you have to get through the first few. Lucas: Exactly. And that's where the new manager's risk tolerance gets tested. If the task is truly critical—like a client presentation that could lose a deal—you might not delegate that one the first time. You build up to it. Start with lower-stakes tasks. Luna: So you're saying delegation is a skill you practice and improve, just like any other management skill. And the sooner you start, the sooner your team becomes self-sufficient. Lucas: And the sooner you can actually do the strategic work you were promoted to do. I think the biggest regret I hear from new managers is not delegating sooner. They look back and realize they spent six months doing work that their team could have handled, and they missed opportunities to influence the broader business. Luna: It's also a retention issue. If your team feels underutilized because you're doing everything, they'll leave. I've seen it happen. A talented junior person who wants to grow will not stay in an environment where the manager doesn't trust them with real work. Lucas: So delegation is a retention tool as much as a productivity tool. That's a strong argument. And it's backed by data. Gallup has found that managers who delegate effectively have teams with 25 percent lower turnover. Luna: Let's bring it back to that marketing manager. Did she turn it around? Lucas: She did. It took about a month of deliberate practice. She started with one task—the email drips. She gave it to Mike with the three-question framework in mind. The first version was rough. She gave feedback once, and the second version was solid. By the third campaign, Mike was owning it end to end. She freed up about eight hours a week. Luna: Eight hours a week. That's a full business day. Imagine what she could do with that time. Strategic planning, mentoring, building relationships with stakeholders. Lucas: Right. And that's the point. Delegation isn't about doing less. It's about doing more of what matters. For her, it meant she could finally focus on the quarterly review with the VP, and she got a budget increase for her team as a result. Luna: That's the win. She went from being a bottleneck to being a lever. And her team got more capable and more engaged. Lucas: I think that's the takeaway for any new manager listening. If you're currently doing work that a team member could do—even if they'd do it a little worse at first—ask yourself why. Is it lack of trust? Is it guilt? Is it impatience? Name it, and then start letting go. Luna: And if you're not sure where to start, pick one task this week. One task that you know you should not be doing anymore. And delegate it with the three-question framework. See what happens. Lucas: One task. That's a small enough step that it doesn't feel overwhelming. And the compound effect over a few months is enormous. Your team grows, you grow, and the whole unit performs better. Luna: I think that's a good place to leave it for today. Next episode, we'll talk about how to handle your first performance review as a manager—a whole different kind of pressure. Lucas: Looking forward to it. Thanks for listening, everyone.