HYXA / Insights
Stop being the bottleneck of your own company
If every decision comes back to you, you do not own a business. You own a demanding job.
Write it down once, and stop explaining it forever.
Owners rarely fail to delegate because the team is weak. They fail because nobody wrote down what "good" looks like.
Delegate in this order
- Write the decision rights: what a manager decides alone, what needs you, what needs two people.
- Give the standard, not the task: the result, the limits, the deadline and the budget.
- Agree how you will be informed — a number, a weekly line, a short review. Not a constant stream.
- Let the first version be worse than yours. That is the price of ever getting your evenings back.
The test
Go away for two weeks without your laptop. Whatever breaks is the thing you should have written down. Whatever survives is your real company.
We write those management playbooks with owners — it is usually five pages and it changes how a company breathes.