How to Delegate When You're Faster at Doing It Yourself

Shelley Lewis
May 17
12 min read

For several years, I owned a complex management estimate for accrued revenue.

I had built the model. I had presented it to the company's executives and walked the external auditors through it. It had been reviewed, tested, and accepted. It worked. It was mine in the way that finance models become yours when you have built them from the ground up and defended them in rooms where people ask hard questions.

Every month, our financial analyst updated it. She was responsible for ensuring the balance made sense within the seasonal ebbs and flows of the business. The model was hers to operate. But it was still, in my mind, mine.

Then one day she came to me with our corporate controller, clearly uncomfortable. She told me the model was missing an element. Not a rounding error. A structural gap that, as the business grew, would make the estimate increasingly inaccurate.

She was right. We revised the model immediately, following her approach going forward.

What stayed with me was not the error, though that was humbling enough. It was the realization that the gap had been there for years. And the only reason it surfaced was that she owned the work deeply enough to question it, and felt safe enough to tell me.

If I had been the one reviewing the model every month, I would likely never have found what she found. I had built the model. I knew how it worked. I did not know what it was missing. I could not have known, because I did not know what I did not know.

When you hold on to the work, you also hold on to your blind spots.

That is the argument for delegation that most management training never makes. Not that it frees up your time, though it does. Not that it develops your team, though it does that too. But that genuine delegation, the kind where someone else truly owns the work, is how you discover what your own expertise has made invisible to you.

The Honest Problem

Most articles about delegation focus on the manager who will not let go for reasons of ego or control. That is a real pattern, but it is not the most common one in finance and accounting teams.

The most common pattern is more sympathetic and more honest: the manager who genuinely is faster, who genuinely does produce better work, who is working at 9 pm trying to keep things moving, and for whom teaching someone else in that moment would take longer than just doing it.

I lived this pattern for years. In an entrepreneurial environment with lean teams and no administrative buffer, doing it myself was often the only way to ensure it got done at all. The urgency was real. The time pressure was real. And the rationalization was completely understandable.

But it had a cost that only became visible later.

Research from MIT Sloan's Elsbeth Johnson, published in Harvard Business Review in 2025, identifies one of the primary barriers to delegation as what she calls an addiction to the dopamine hit of easy productivity: the immediate satisfaction of completing a task you are already good at, compared to the slower and more uncertain work of developing someone else's capability to do it.1

That description is precise. Doing the work yourself feels productive. Teaching someone else to do it does not feel productive, at least not in the moment. It feels like a cost because, in the short term, it is one.

The calculation changes entirely when you extend the time horizon.

What Doing It Yourself Actually Costs

It Costs Your Team Their Development

Every time you do something yourself because you are faster, you make it permanently true that no one else on your team can do it. Not because they lack the capability, but because they have never had the chance to develop it.

This is the compounding cost that is invisible in the moment. You save an hour today. You add an hour to every future instance of that task, indefinitely, because the only person who knows how to do it is you.

Finance and accounting work is highly specialized. When knowledge concentrates in a single person, the team becomes structurally fragile. Absent for a week, promoted out, or eventually retired, and the gap is suddenly operational.

It Costs Your Team Their Trust

When a manager consistently does work that belongs to their team, the team reads the message accurately: you do not trust us with this.

They may not say it directly. But the conclusion is reasonable. If the manager keeps stepping in, keeps reviewing everything, keeps doing it themselves when the pressure is on, the team concludes that their manager does not believe they are capable.

That conclusion does not produce effort. It produces frustration. The team member who has been managed around, whose contributions are quietly supplemented or corrected, who is never fully trusted with ownership of their own work, does not become more engaged. They become less.

A 2025 Psychology Today study described delegation as an emotional disruption akin to grief for managers, particularly those promoted for their technical skills. The work they are supposed to delegate is the very work that once proved their worth. Handing it off can feel like relinquishing expertise, credibility, or identity.2 What that framing misses is that the team member on the receiving end of the non-delegation experiences something too: the quiet signal that they are not yet trusted with the real work.

It Costs You What You Do Not Know You Do Not Know

This is the cost that surprised me most when I finally understood it.

When I built that accrued revenue model, I did so based on my own understanding of the business. I knew the model well. I had thought carefully about what it needed to capture. I had tested it against the auditors' questions and found it sound.

What I could not see was what my understanding of the model prevented me from seeing. The assumptions I had built in were so early that they had become invisible. The gaps that only appeared when someone with fresh eyes and genuine ownership of the calculation started asking why.

That analyst asked why. She traced through the logic until she found the place where it stopped making complete sense. She came to me with her findings because she had developed the confidence, through real ownership of the work, to trust her own judgment over my established model.

If I had been the one maintaining the model, I would have been looking at it through the lens of the person who built it. I would not have found the gap. Not because I was not capable, but because expertise in a thing can blind you to its limitations.

Humility and curiosity are the qualities that drive that kind of discovery. They cannot be manufactured in a team member who has never been given genuine ownership of anything. They develop through real responsibility for real work.

Surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you, who ask why, and then actually giving them the work to question. That is not a management strategy. It is the whole point of having a team.

Why It Is Genuinely Hard

I want to be honest about why delegation is difficult, because dismissing the difficulty does not help anyone.

The Upfront Cost Is Real

Teaching someone to do something you can already do well takes more time than doing it yourself. That is not a rationalization. It is true. The first time you hand something off, you are doing and teaching simultaneously. The second time, you are reviewing and coaching. The third time, you are overseeing. Only after several iterations is the task truly handed off, and your time genuinely freed.

For managers working in high-pressure finance environments, that investment curve is genuinely difficult to make when the quarter-end deadline is tomorrow. The short-term cost is real, and the long-term payoff is invisible in that moment.

Understanding this does not make the investment unnecessary. It makes it worth planning for. Delegation requires a degree of deliberate scheduling. The first handoff of a complex task should happen when there is enough time to do it properly, not in the last minute mode that so many finance teams operate in for most of the year.

Perfectionism Is Not Always Wrong

Finance and accounting work is held to a high standard. Numbers matter. Errors have consequences. The instinct to maintain quality is not a character flaw. It is a professional value.

The problem is when that instinct becomes the reason never to hand anything off. When the standard is held so tightly that only one person can ever meet it, the standard itself becomes a barrier to the team's development.

The distinction worth holding onto is between the standard and the method. The standard matters. The way a task gets done is often more flexible than the person who built the original approach believes.

My analyst's model was not built the way I would have built it. Her use of Excel was significantly more sophisticated than mine. The output was more accurate and more robust than what I had produced. The method was different. The standard was not just met. It was exceeded.

Letting go of your method while holding on to your standard is the practical skill at the heart of effective delegation. It requires trusting that someone can meet the standard even if they do not take your exact path to get there.

You Have to Let Them Make Mistakes

This is perhaps the most uncomfortable reality of genuine delegation.

People learn through mistakes. Not catastrophic ones that irreparably damage the organization or the team member's confidence. But the ordinary mistakes of someone who is figuring something out for the first time: the calculation that needs reworking, the approach that does not quite hold up under scrutiny, the question they should have asked earlier but did not think to ask until after.

If you step in every time a mistake occurs, you take away the opportunity to learn. You also confirm what the team member already suspected: they cannot be fully trusted with this work.

Creating the conditions in which someone can make a recoverable mistake, learn from it, and do it better next time is not negligent management. It is exactly what development looks like in practice.

Research from the DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 80 percent of senior leaders cite delegation as the top skill for preventing burnout and scaling leadership impact. Gallup's research found that high-delegating leaders generated significantly stronger organizational outcomes than their low-delegating counterparts.3 The capacity to delegate well is not a soft skill. It is a core driver of organizational performance.

A Practical Framework for Making the Shift

If you recognize yourself in this article, here is a practical approach that accounts for the real difficulty rather than pretending it does not exist.

Start With the Standard, Not the Task

Before handing anything off, be explicit about what good looks like. Not how it should be done, but what the outcome needs to achieve. What accuracy is required? What does a complete output look like? What questions should it answer?

When the standard is clear, the method becomes flexible. The team member can find their own approach. And sometimes, as happened with my analyst, their approach will be better than yours.

Invest the Time When You Have It

The first handoff of a complex task should not happen at 9 pm the night before a deadline. It should happen during a period when there is enough time to do it well.

This requires planning. It requires looking ahead at the next iteration of a task and scheduling the first delegated attempt with enough lead time to review, discuss, and course-correct without the pressure of an imminent deadline.

It also requires being honest with yourself about the tasks you have been doing at 9 pm because there was never a right moment. There is rarely a right moment. You have to create one.

Cultivate the Why Question

The best thing a financial analyst can do with a model, a process, or a calculation they have inherited is ask why. Why is it structured this way? Why does this assumption hold? Why has this not been updated?

There is a practice in problem-solving of asking why five times in succession to get beneath the surface explanation to the root of an issue. In financial analysis, that instinct, applied genuinely and without assumption that the existing approach is necessarily optimal, is what produces the kind of insight my analyst brought to me.

As a manager, your job is to create the environment where that question is welcome. Where someone who finds a gap in a model you built does not feel that they are criticizing you, but contributing to something that matters.

That environment does not exist when the manager never really lets go of the work. It exists when ownership is real, questions are genuinely invited, and the team member's judgment is trusted enough that their findings are acted on.

Separate Delegation from Abdication

Delegating ownership does not mean disappearing from the work. It means shifting your role within it.

From executor to reviewer. From reviewer to coach. From coach to the person who is available when a genuinely difficult judgment call requires your input.

That progression takes time. It requires ongoing conversation about how the work is going, what questions are arising, and what the team member is discovering. It is not hands-off management. It is hands-off execution with hands-on development.

The distinction matters because the fear of abdication is often what keeps managers doing work themselves. They are not wrong that the work requires oversight. They are wrong that oversight requires them to do the work.

What Changes When You Actually Let Go

Throughout my career, I surrounded myself with people who were smarter than me in specific domains. Analysts who understood the data better. Controllers who could hold more complexity in their heads than I could. People whose favourite question was why, and who were willing to ask it even when the answer they found was uncomfortable to deliver.

That did not happen automatically. It happened because I gave them real work to own, real problems to solve, and enough trust in their judgment that they believed their findings would be heard.

Not always smoothly. Not without the awkward period of doing and teaching simultaneously while also trying to meet the deadline. Not without occasionally wincing at a method I would not have chosen.

But when my analyst walked into my office with a finding that improved a model I had built and defended for years, that was not a failure of my expertise. That was the whole point.

If you are a first-time manager reading this, the most useful reframe I can offer is this: your job is not to be the best at every task your team performs. Your job is to create the conditions where your team gets better at those tasks than you ever were.

That requires letting go of the work. Not all at once. Not without investment and oversight. But with enough genuine trust that the people you lead can discover things you have not thought to look for.

If you are an organizational leader reading this, the question worth asking is: have we built environments where people feel safe enough to come to their manager and say the model is missing something? Where finding the gap is welcomed rather than perceived as a threat?

Because that is what delegation at its best actually produces. Not just freed-up time. Not just developed team members. But the organizational intelligence that only emerges when people who are curious, capable, and genuinely trusted are given real work to own.

About the Author

Shelley Lewis-Mercier is a CPA, MBA (HR Specialization), and ICF-Certified Coach with over 30 years of experience leading finance and HR teams. As a former CFO and senior HR executive, she has lived the full arc of delegation, from holding on too long to learning what becomes possible when you finally let go. She is the founder of Foundation First, a manager readiness program for first-time managers in finance and accounting.

Learn more at manager-readiness.com.

Endnotes

1. Johnson, Elsbeth. "Why Aren't I Better at Delegating?" Harvard Business Review, September-October 2025. Johnson, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, identifies four barriers to effective delegation drawn from research and two decades of advising senior leaders. The finding that managers are drawn to the immediate productivity satisfaction of doing work themselves rather than the slower investment of developing others is particularly relevant to technically skilled professionals transitioning into management. https://hbr.org/2025/09/why-arent-i-better-at-delegating

2. Cited in: Locked On Leadership. "Identify the Common Reasons for Avoiding Delegation and What to Do Instead." Lockedonleadership.com, November 2025. Drawing on a 2025 Psychology Today study on the emotional experience of delegation for managers promoted from technical roles. The finding that delegation feels like grief because it entails handing off work that once defined a manager's professional worth is directly relevant to first-time managers in finance and accounting. https://lockedonleadership.com/blog/identify-the-common-reasons-for-avoiding-delegation-and-what-to-do-instead/

3. DDI World. Global Leadership Forecast 2025. Development Dimensions International, 2025. The finding that 80 percent of senior leaders cite delegation as the top skill for preventing burnout and scaling impact is drawn from DDI's survey of leadership trends across thousands of organizations. The Gallup finding on high-delegating leaders and organizational outcomes is cited in multiple leadership development sources drawing on Gallup's State of the American Manager research. https://www.ddiworld.com/research/global-leadership-forecast