It’s quicker if I just do it myself

Picture the head of an accounts team. It is half past five on a Thursday and she is working through the month-end close, a task she could have handed to a colleague a week ago. The colleague knows how to do it. She would just be slower, and she would have plenty of questions at the start. Explaining the process would take an hour. Doing it herself takes twenty minutes. The sums look sensible, so she does it herself. And again next month.

There is one more item in that calculation that never makes it into a spreadsheet. Handing work over means putting weight on someone else. It means saying „this one is yours“ and living with the fact that they would rather not. For many managers, that moment is more uncomfortable than an evening spent on the close. So they put it off, even when they know handing it over would cost less. Over a year, the twenty minutes add up to four hours she could have spent on something else.

The guilt nobody mentions in meetings

Modupe Akinola of Columbia Business School and her colleagues Ashley Martin and Katherine Phillips examined delegation across five studies, published in 2018 in the Academy of Management Journal.¹ Women in leadership roles associated delegation more strongly with asserting power and viewed it more negatively than men did. They experienced more guilt when handing tasks over. They delegated less, and when they did delegate, their exchanges with subordinates went less well.¹ That guilt changed how much work stayed on their desks.