What a Bridal Shower Taught Me About Letting Go

Issue #24

By Debbie Lawrence

Read time: 8 minutes

I love a good jigsaw puzzle. Now that you can do them electronically, I love them even more.

Earlier in my career, I ran the registrar’s division of a college. One of the biggest parts of that job was building the class schedules. Every faculty, every year of every multi-year program, every instructor, everything they taught, all of it had to lock together for hundreds of students and a large staff. It was a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces were people’s careers and the picture on the box kept changing.

I loved it. I was really good at it and I could take something genuinely complex and make it work.

I also spent close to 100 hours building that schedule, three times a year, every year.

By the time I was senior enough that this was not the best use of my time, I still hadn’t let it go. I told myself I had a superpower. I was convinced that not just anybody could sit down and do what I did, which, to be fair, was true. I decided that made me a needle in a haystack. A unicorn of sorts.

Let’s be honest, I was not a unicorn. That was just my ego talking, and I’ve come to believe ego is at the root of a lot of what keeps us from delegating.

I never believed anyone else could do it as well as I could, so I never gave it away. Meanwhile I was drowning, at the college some nights, at my dining room table on others, all hours, week after week, semester after semester building those schedules. All that time going into one task meant I couldn’t get to the things only I should have been doing. I was also quietly limiting my own growth and every opportunity that my time and focus could have gone toward instead.

I had already proven I could build the schedule. Every semester, I proved it again. Now as I look back at that time in my career I can see clearly that I wasn’t proving it to anyone but myself.

Then I hit a breaking point I still think about. A close friend who was also a work colleague had an only child Loretta who was terminally ill and was having her bridal shower. I still feel the deep remorse I live with as I write this because I skipped it. I was in my office at the 11th hour, finalizing the September schedule as the start of the semester bore down on me, and I chose the schedule over being with Loretta and her mom for such an important occasion. I’m ashamed of that choice. It’s the moment I go back to when I think about what holding on to work too long can really cost you. I don’t want anyone else to have to hit a point of no return like that before they see it.

The pattern revealed

Looking back, with the years and the maturity I have now, it’s almost funny how attached I was. But underneath the “nobody else can do this” story was something less flattering: I needed to control it. My ego needed the credit, the indispensability, the feeling of being the one person who could pull it off.

It wasn’t until I woke up that I started, slowly, to bring someone else in. She needed support the first time. Then she didn’t. She ended up succeeding me, and she was brilliant at it. Watching her take something I’d guarded for years and simply do it well was one of the more humbling and pivotal moments of my career.

Why capable women do this

I hear some version of my schedule story constantly from women who lead. The specifics change but the reasoning doesn’t.

“It’s faster if I just do it myself.”

“Nobody else knows this the way I do.”

“I tried delegating once and it was a disaster.”

“I’ll hand it off next month, once things calm down.”

None of these are lies, exactly. They’re just not the real reason. The real reason usually sounds more like what I told myself about the schedule: if I let go, I lose the thing that makes me feel needed. I lose control. I lose the proof that I’m the one who can do the hard thing.

That story is very, very expensive. It was expensive for me, and it’s expensive for the capable women I coach who are still building their own version of a 100-hour puzzle nobody asked them to keep assembling alone.

What it looks like on the other side

One of my clients, I’ll call her Nicki, owns three retail stores. For eight years, she personally did the full physical inventory across all three locations, every single month. If you do the math, by the time she opened store number three that responsibility had grown to sixteen hours a month, every month, for years.

Run that forward and it gets sharper. Sixteen hours a month is 192 hours a year. Divide that by an eight-hour working day and you get 24 days. At her peak, with three stores running, Nicki was spending nearly an entire month of workdays every single year doing nothing but counting inventory.

When I asked her why when she had a store manager who could clearly handle it, she gave me every excuse on the list above. Then I asked her the question I ask myself when I think about that schedule: what would happen if you got hit by a bus tomorrow and physically could not do this?

She paused. “Someone would have to figure it out.”

“So the question isn’t whether someone can do this,” I said. “It’s why you’re choosing to keep doing it yourself.”

She got quiet, then told me the truth. When she did inventory herself, she felt in control and a deep sense of accomplishment. She knew exactly what she had, what was selling, and what needed attention. Just the thought of delegating it felt uncomfortable, like she would be operating in the dark, although she had no proof that would happen because she had never tried to delegate it.

Nicki eventually delegated it, deliberately and in stages, starting with close oversight and building up her manager’s ownership over several months. The first month took her manager longer than it took Nicki, which was to be expected for anyone doing something like this at the start. By month three, the reports were more accurate than Nicki’s had ever been, they were delivered early, and Nicki was reviewing them in twenty minutes instead of doing sixteen hours of counting. By the end of that year, Nicki had used the time she got back to open a fourth location.

Nobody was hit by a bus and, if anything, her business became more efficient and more profitable.

A tool for what to hand off, and how much to hand off

Something I’ve started using with clients, and with myself, that would have saved me years at that dining room table is this: before you delegate anything, decide how much rope you’re giving. Vague delegation is where most of a leader’s experience with delegation falls apart. “Can you handle this?” means something different to you than it does to them, and you’ll both be frustrated when the outcome doesn’t match the expectation.

Think of it as a dial, not a light switch. On one end, you want someone to follow your exact process and report back before anything moves forward. On the other end, you hand someone the whole thing and tell them to run with it, full stop, checking in only if something goes wrong. In between, there’s a lot of room: someone can gather information for you to decide, offer a recommendation you’ll approve, or take action and simply keep you posted.

None of these levels is more “generous” than the other. The right one depends on the person’s track record with this particular kind of work, how much you trust them with it, their skillset, and what’s at stake if it goes sideways. Someone brand new to a task and something high-stakes both call for tighter rope at first. A proven person on lower-stakes work can run with almost no oversight.

The mistake I made with the schedule wasn’t only that I never delegated it. It’s that I never even considered what level I’d be comfortable handing off, so I defaulted to being the only one who could do it semester after semester. Learn from my experience. Once you run with something enough that you know what  the end result needs to look like, pick a level on purpose and move forward from there. You can always loosen it once you see what someone does with it.

What I do differently now

When I catch myself thinking “it’s just faster if I do it,” I’ve trained myself to ask a follow-up: faster for whom, and for how long? A task that’s faster for me today at the cost of one hundred hours a year is not actually fast. It’s just familiar, and it flatters my ego to keep it.

I also ask myself Nicki’s question when something’s stuck to me longer than it should: what would happen if I genuinely couldn’t do this anymore? If the honest answer is “someone would figure it out,” that’s usually my cue to delegate the thing.

I still catch the pull of feeling needed. I don’t think that instinct ever fully disappears. The difference now is I notice it while I’m still holding the puzzle piece, not three semesters and one missed bridal shower later for which there is never a do over.

Your turn

Here’s where I want you to start. It’s not with the whole process but just the first move.

Name the thing you already know you should be delegating. You don’t have to think hard about this one. It’s the task that came to mind a few paragraphs back, the one you’re already minimizing right now.

Then look at the dial. Not “should I delegate this” but “what level am I comfortable handing it to today?” Do you need to see every step before anything goes out, or are you ready to hand over the whole thing and just get updates? Answer honestly, not aspirationally. You can always move the dial later.

Now ask yourself: who on my team is already operating at that level? If someone comes to mind, that’s your person. If nobody does, that’s useful information too. It means the real work this month is about building someone up to that level, not doing the task yourself for one more quarter.

That’s the starting point. It’s one piece of a much bigger picture. Inside the Clarity Cohort, we work through my full 9+6 Delegation Protocol together, step by step, so nothing gets stuck at “who do I even ask.” If you’re ready to go deeper, that’s where I’d point you.

In the meantime, comment below and tell me what you named. I read and respond to every response. And I love hearing from you.

P.S. You can also listen to this issue on The Compassionate Leader School podcast episode, which drops the same day on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major platforms. Click here to explore all the episodes.