Show Notes
How to delegate as a manager gets tested exactly once or twice a year, and most managers throw the result away. You take a week off. You spend the four days before you leave pre-deciding everything, you write the handoff doc, you tell three people to call you if anything comes up. Then you check your phone at the gate, at baggage claim, and nine more times on Tuesday. And you come home and say it went fine, nothing blew up.
That week was not a risk you survived. It was the only honest report you will ever get on your own leadership, and you spent it erasing the data.
Here is the problem with evaluating your own leadership. You cannot observe it, because you are standing in it. Every meeting you have run, you were in the room. Every decision you watched your team make, you were there while they made it. You are in every piece of evidence you have about yourself. So you do not have a read on your team. You have a read on your team with you in it, and those are two different organizations. A team that can reach you did not run without you. It ran with a slower version of you.
In this episode I walk through The Empty Chair, three moves for using an absence as a measurement instead of surviving it:
ONE. LEAVE A DECISION, NOT A LIST. A handoff doc is a list of answers to questions you already thought of, and the real week contains three things that are not on it. Leave a decision boundary instead. Who decides, one name. How far, in real units. What genuinely waits. And the line that does more work than the other three combined, which is I will back you.
TWO. GO DARK ON PURPOSE. One person has your number, and the bar should be almost embarrassing to say out loud. No Slack, no skimming email, no Tuesday call you scheduled with yourself. Every time you answer while you are away, you delete a day of data, because the moment your team knows you are reading, they start writing for an audience.
THREE. READ THE PILE. Did anything break is the wrong question, because it has two answers and one of them is a lie. Read everything that waited for you before you clear it. What waited that should not have is a permission gap, not a delegation gap. What got decided, and whether it was defensible, is not the same as whether you would have decided it that way. And who got asked while you were gone is your real org chart.
Plus how it maps to the LEAD Framework: Listen, Envision, Align, Drive. And the one day you can run this on without waiting for a vacation. ------------------------------------- Get my coaching frameworks behind the scenes. One idea and one small shift to your inbox every week. Start here: https://www.thejohnespinosa.com/start-here
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