Is your delegation actually abdication?

Every business owner dreams of a bulletproof team and effective delegation when scaling. But what happens when you try to outsource the most critical role of all: being the boss? In this episode, we tackle the painful but necessary truth: no matter how talented your team is or how much support you pay for, you alone are responsible for the results in your business and making the key strategy decisions. Learn how the urge to escape the hard parts of your business leads to a breakdown in leadership, the tell-tale signs that you’re confusing delegation with the abdication of responsibility (and why your team is bringing you “bizarro” tasks), and the powerful difference between owning the decision versus controlling the implementation. If you’re a CEO or boss looking to scale without losing control, tune in.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

You Can’t Outsource Being The Boss

As business owners, we talk a lot here about building a team. Part of that is because Gwen, my fearless co-host and operational expert extraordinaire business advisor. All the things. My personal business guru maven. I don’t think you’re supposed to use girl and maven in the same context like that but we’re going to do this. We talked a lot about building a team because that is something that Gwen works with a lot of people who are building a team. A lot of women who are starting to scale and doing all that.

We talked a lot about how you hire great people, delegating effectively and surrounding ourselves with experts. There is this line that we haven’t talked about yet that no matter how good your people are, it’s this line you can’t cross. That is that nobody can be the boss of your business but you. As we wrap up our What We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know series, I am coming to you with the most painful lesson I’ve had to learn in almost twenty years in business.

Which is that no matter how much support you have, no matter how much you pay for that support, you are still the one who is responsible for the results in your business and making the key decisions. Gwen, typically, this is where I would be like, “This is my sad tale of whoa and how I came to this heart-wrenching realization.” Before we make it all about me, I would like you to talk about your experience. I don’t think so much that a business owner knows that they struggle with being the boss of their own business. What I think it is they want somebody else to be the boss for a while.

There are several things that can be playing into this. Different personalities are probably attracted by things. One is, if you’ve come out of the corporate world, which a lot of people do before they become entrepreneurs. If you come out of the corporate world, you’re in these bigger organizations. Although, the CEO is the boss. It’s not quite the same necessarily as being the owner of the business.

There’s this assumption of, “If I’m the CEO, then I have delegated everything below me.” If you’ve got a staff of 100 or 200 or 3,000 or 50,000, depending on how big of an organization you were in. There’s this belief that if I’m doing anything at all, if I haven’t delegated everything. I’m not really the boss. Part of this is laying a completely different level of business or different business model. I’m assuming that people that are reading this episode are not CEOs of businesses with 50,000 employees.

If you are, drop us an email. We’d love to know your reading.

 

 

Previous Corporate Experiences Don’t Apply To Small Business

If this is true. That’s the first thing. We often take our previous experiences and we try and apply them into an environment that doesn’t line up in a clear way.

I never would have said that. I will tell you flat out. I never thought that specifically. As you bring it up, I had that experience. It’s not all of it, but it’s part of it because in my entire working career, I was the linchpin. I’ve talked about this before. I’m the person that every organization I’ve left, I had to be replaced by 3 to 5 people. There was a time when it was like a badge of honor for me like, “It took three people to replace me.”

I then realized what a chump I was because I was doing the work of 3 to 5 people for one person’s salary. Being told constantly how irreplaceable I was, especially when I worked in larger organizations. I did a lot of managing up. I was that go-to person and then as a business owner, when I was deep and running my agency. I was looking to hire another person. That’s the words I would use, “I need another me.” I was looking for this linchpin. I wanted this person because it was all the things I could have done. Sometimes if my supervisor would have just gotten out of my way and been more supportive of that.

There was that piece of it, but then there was also the piece of wanting the relief that I knew that I used to give my supervisors. I had one boss who would just be like, “I know when I hand you something, I don’t ever have to worry because you’ll think through ten steps that I didn’t even know existed.”

That’s the second piece that comes into it. It may not be that we are giving up all of the leadership of our business. What we tend to do and I’m guilty of it as well, is giving up the leadership of the part that’s hard and takes the biggest part of our energy. We’ve talked about this. As I said, this is me. I’m not talking about you. It’s the part that’s super hard. This is back to other advice that we hear all the time, “Hire people who are better than you. Hire people who are smarter.”

Abdicating leadership means giving up the hardest part—the one that demands the most energy. Share on X

All of those things. Sometimes we think that we’re no longer valuable in that conversation. We’re just going to let them do the thing. Which is another place where we stopped leading. They probably know better. I always let them do what they need to do. They probably know better. In this case, I’m speaking for myself that I know I have had those thoughts.

It is part of the same culture of, you want to hire people who are smarter than you and who knows better than you. All of these are tightly related but depending on your background. Contacts matter. The third one is this whole. If you’re the CEO of the business, you don’t ever have to show up or do anything. That was the social media meme, for a lack of better descriptor. The people are buying into it that being CEO meant, I didn’t work at all. I just made all the money.

Honestly, that could be true as an owner. That’s one of the things that I love about Mike Michalowicz talking about Profit First. Profit is the money you make for investing in starting a business. Not for the money that you make for doing work in the business. That’s a much smaller number than what he calls owner’s comp for which is doing work in the business, as an owner participant in the business. You could be but when they say it’s CEO, it’s not CEO. That’s “I want to be the owner of a business.”

A CEO is the Chief Executive Officer, which means they’re still in the process of making decisions. I had a good friend for years and years and finally, she ended up buying part of the business. Someone came in and bought a business but she had a whole other career. In this case, she was an emergency room doctor.

She was used to making some decisions.

Exactly, and she bought a yarn shop. She was not CEO of that business. She hired someone who was an amazing manager. It was one of my good friends who was the CEO. The title was manager, but she was the one making all these decisions and doing all of those things. The owner also wasn’t getting paid like a CEO.

I wasn’t getting paid the equivalent of being in the shop five days a week.

She was the owner. That’s the other place that we get stuck.

I feel like that’s its own episode that we should make a note to explore later.

It could be.

Definitely. I was going to ask about what you think business owners are trying to escape when they tried to outsource being the boss and you went there. What I realized for me is, I was trying to outsource fundamental functions of business that I didn’t like, didn’t want to do, and didn’t want to learn. I had a saint of a long-time assistant who didn’t grow into the role quite how I had wanted them to.

Part of it is because they had strong boundaries. I remember a conversation where they’re like, “Tonya, I will do whatever you want me to do just give me a checklist.” I was like, “If I wanted to write the checklist, I wouldn’t have hired you. You write the checklist.” She was like, “What do I put on the checklist? We don’t have SOPs. We don’t have an operation manual. What do you want on your checklist?” I’m like, “What do you think should be there? What would help you?” She was like, “What would help you?” This was our conversation back and forth.

I could totally imagine this conversation.

Trying To Outsource Fundamental Business Functions And Structure

We’re frustrated with each other but we had enough of a relationship that we could have that conversation. She’s like, “I know you’re frustrated with me but I am not in your head. I don’t sit on sales calls with you and your clients. Throw me a bone here.” I’m like, “I get frustrated but what part of this business for the last few years has made you think that my brain works like that?” Ultimately, what I realized I needed to do is I needed to get rid of my whole team. She helped me to recognize.

I had to get rid of my whole team and relearn my business from the ground up and force myself to look at those pieces I didn’t want to look at. I didn’t want operating procedures. I would have told you back then that I didn’t know how to create them. What working with you for the past four years has taught me is not that I didn’t know how to create an SOP. In fact, I’m a pretty darn good SOP creator. It was that I didn’t want to make decisions. I wanted flexibility. I wanted to do it case by case.

I remember her back in the day telling me, “Tonya, if everything is case by case, we can’t grow.” We can. You just do your part and I do my part. We’ll be fine, but what I know now is I was trying to escape building a structure and maintaining a structure that supported the organization. I wanted an externally imposed structure because, though I didn’t know it then and I didn’t know until you were just talking. What I was trying to do is recreate an employment scenario that I had because that’s what was familiar.

It’s interesting because a lot of folks do, particularly when they’re first coming in to owning their own business. If they have been in any other situation, that’s what makes sense. It’s the thing that makes sense. How else would you do this? It should be this structure. What most of us don’t realize particularly if we go to work for something that has been around for a long period of time. When I say long, I’m not talking like 40 or 50 years. I’ve been talking for like 10 or 15 years. It doesn’t feel empty for a long period of time but if we’re jumping in after it’s gotten past several of the earlier stages of business. We don’t understand that these same processes had to happen.

They probably happened differently, depending on what business it was and how it was funded and the time frame of when it was built and all of the rest of it. These things still have to happen. If we haven’t been a part of it, we assume that somehow that was magic and it was there. Particularly if we’ve had three or four different employment experiences and they’ve all been the same in that environment. That’s the piece. If you haven’t worked in an organization that started small and built over time, you don’t understand what that environment is.

It’s hard to imagine. Even if you’re not doing the tech company super fast growth venture capital scenario. Even if it’s just you growing your own business a little bit at a time, you don’t understand what that takes. It’s an interesting piece to understand that that’s part of it. We want someone else to deal with this piece. It’s one of the things that I discovered early when I was first starting to do operations. I used to talk about it, but we haven’t talked about it for a long time.

I don’t know if we’ve talked about it on the show at all. For instance, people assume that they naturally should be good at their business operations because it’s the backbone of the business. It’s all the underpinning of the business and everyone seems to be able to do it. Why would I need help with this? It must be intuitive. It must be super easy to do because everyone seems to be able to do it. It’s like, “Most people are just faking it up to the point that they can no longer fake it.”

Back to speaking only for myself here. I didn’t know what operations was.

Someone else was handling it in those other organizations.

First of all, coming from my earlier jobs, it didn’t have anybody with that title. Somebody was handling the function but they didn’t have operations in their title. When I went to work for higher Ed, operations was physical Planning and Development. It was the business. At some point, before I left, the university had matured enough to have an actual COO but for the longest time, the only operations anybody was worried about were facilities and grounds and things like that.

It was facilities management. Physical plant.

Exactly. It wasn’t until I went to work for an online education company. They had been around for quite some time. That’s when I learned that there’s a difference between business operations and marketing operations and all of that. That is after I had my own little personal crisis of failing miserably at hiring me for me. Thinking that what I was doing was the successful path to scaling that I’m supposed to follow as a business owner who goes from solopreneur to agency to whatever.

I was just flying by the seat of my pants. I truly was the epitome of, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Anytime I would ask, people would tell me not to worry about that until later because those people were selling me marketing solutions. I didn’t know that then. I know that now. I know that only because I’m working with you. I can tell you what it looked like for me and I’ve already done that to some degree. What are some other examples of what it can look like in real life when somebody is trying to outsource being the boss of their business?

One of the things that is interesting is, do you have so little knowledge of what’s going on in an area that you can’t even talk about it at a high level? There are certain things that you and Sheena, and others take care of that I don’t know exactly how they get done. I generally know what’s getting done but more importantly, I know why it’s getting done. If you can answer at least the why an d probably the what, maybe not the how. Usually, the house when we’re getting down in the weeds of actually doing it. At least to the why, that’s a sign that you’ve probably advocated responsibility where it’s inappropriate. Part of the reason I know that is you and I had that conversation about me a while ago.

 

 

We had it like January-ish of 2025.

Time flies when you’re having fun. What I realized was I had advocated all of my marketing to you. You know more about it. I don’t need to know about it. What we realized was that it was taking us further and further away from where we needed to be. I needed to know the why. I needed to be asking the why we’re doing this. I needed to be clear on why we were doing this. Even if sometimes I lose track of the why, it needed to be so obvious that it was like, “What we said.” It was like, “I remember us saying that. This is why we’re doing this thing.” Sometimes, being the person to say that’s why we were doing it is still a good reason why we’re doing it.

I generally know what we’re doing marketing-wise. As I said, a lot of times, I don’t know how we’re doing things. I don’t know all the steps of how we get the show published, for example, but I know why we’re having the show. I know what the key pieces are about the show as I said. That’s one of the signs. Can you say the why to any pieces of the business? When you use your example, one of the things that you can come up with is you couldn’t explain why you needed these operations. It was like, “Because you said we do.” That’s not a good enough reason.

A Sign Of Delegated Responsibility Is Not Knowing The Why

That’s one of the first flags for anybody. Can you explain the why of everything that’s going on in the business and probably at least a high level of what those things are. As I said, not necessarily the house. That’s when we’re starting to delegate. Understanding what those whys are is an important piece. As I said, a lot of the time, the reason we don’t know is because we’re not even sure why we need it.

What I would say is, what it can look like in real life when you’re outsourcing being the boss is, if you ever find yourself saying things like, “I don’t care how it gets done. Do it.” If somebody is coming to you and saying, “How do I do this?” You’re telling them just to do it. That’s an indicator that you haven’t given them the information they need to either know what success looks like, know what the goal is or you haven’t given them the information they need in what is expected and why are we doing this. They don’t even know why we’re doing this and you’re just telling them to just go do it.

If you ever say, 'I don’t care how it gets done—just do it,' you’ve likely outsourced too much decision-making. Share on X

What ends up often happening in that scenario is what they come back with is what I like to call the bizarro version of the task or of the thing. It’s like you told them to create an SOP and they said, “I don’t know how to create an SOP. I’ve never done that before.” You say,  “Google it.” They go, and they Google SOPs. You all know what happens when you google. You don’t necessarily get the best thing at the top. You just get either an ad, somebody paying to be at the top or you get the thing that everybody clicks on. Which usually means the title seems like it could be right.

They come back and the SOP they hand you is like an SOP for a fifteen-person department. You’re just like, “What do you mean the EA does this and then the bookkeeper does that? We don’t have a bookkeeper and an EA.” You’re frustrated because you just paid for wasted work and all of that. If you feel like you outsource something and then when it comes back, it is nothing like what you expected. Chances are you outsourced way too much decision-making. That is one thing that happens when the owner stops fully owning decisions.

The other thing that oftentimes will happen when an owner stops fully owning decisions and this is as somebody where people have hired. You’re not the only person who’s hired me for marketing. You’re like, “I got marketing personnel. I don’t have to worry about anything else.” “We’re good. I got marketing.” Somebody’s like, “How’s sales going?” “They’re low but I got marketing. I’m good.”

Sales will drop and oftentimes, sales calls will drop because the owner has thought, “I have somebody in charge of marketing. I’ll just sit here and wait for everything to come to me.” Sitting here, waiting. If marketing is working, they’ll all come to me. 1) That’s not how business typically works. 2) Definitely not how business works if you are both the owner and the person who is responsible for delivery.

It is what we’re advertised for.

It’s what we’re told. We’re sold laptop lifestyles to make money wisely.

If you’re marketing is in place, then everything is just going to flow in

It’s a faucet.

As easy as can be. Now, I’ll say the other thing that I have seen you in an example from years and years ago is when your clients don’t actually know who you are or would rather spend time with your people as opposed to you. This is, I’m the CEO of the business and I don’t have to do anything anymore. Back to if you’re going to position yourself as an owner, I invested in this business, then that makes sense. If you’re owning this business and being CEO of the business, everyone should be excited to spend time with you. If they’re not, then that means you advocated all of the power and leadership of the business to somebody else.

Back to, if the goal is to be an owner. That’s okay.

We have a number of people who are manufacturers in the craft industry. I worked with a number of those over the years. Everyone is excited to be able to spend a tiny bit of time with the owners of those businesses even though they are no longer the ones doing the work that’s creating the product. They’re owners but they’re also CEOs. Everyone’s like, “I get to see fill in the blank,” like that’s a big deal because they’re also lovely people. Why would you not want to spend time with them but that’s not why they’re excited.

I’ve seen businesses where I’m going to be the CEO and I’m stepping away from all of the things. Those people are like, “That’s great if you show up but I’m not that interested.” Now, as an owner, I own stock in stuff. No one cares if I show up because I’m an owner. I’m not the CEO. Understanding that distinction and that’s another thing that’s easy to sign. If people stop caring about who you are in the business, then you may have moved yourself to owner, which could be your goal. If it’s not your goal, be aware.

You have to be careful.

That you’ve given too much power and authority to the other people and now that’s who everyone wants to talk to and be associated with.

Again, if that’s the business model, there is nothing wrong with that. I know a lot of agency owners who would love that. I know a lot of agency owners who want to be the principal delivering the service. The reason they have a team is because they want to be the person like in my case. When I had my agency fully operational, what I loved was working with the clients to create a strategy. What I didn’t necessarily need to be doing was the person loading all the content into the membership, implementing all those things.

That’s the piece that I wanted to outsource or do the project management piece. Making sure that we had all the things that we needed when we needed them. The thing is because I was like, “I hired a support person. Therefore, I don’t have to worry about anything.” I was asking somebody to do the project management without telling them why we needed the things when we needed them.

They had no way of knowing what was the deal breaker and what it was. Before we close, I want to talk a little bit about why this can be uncomfortable. As you said,  part of it is because we’re trying to outsource the aspects of the business we don’t want, like, know, and are not comfortable with in some other way.

It’s not our strength.

The Job Shifts Into Managing People When You Have A Team

The other problem and you mentioned this. I don’t know if it was the last episode or an episode before. Fully owning the role of boss is harder than people expect because we think when we hire somebody for five hours a week. We think we get five hours a week back in our schedule and we never do. I’m going to repeat what you said a couple episodes ago. Best case scenario, you might get four and a half hours back but there’s still an aspect of time you have to spend communicating with that person that you’ve hired to do that job five hours a week and making sure that everything is running as it should be.

You’re the queen of accountability. There has to be checks and balances for everything. You don’t realize that when you go from being yourself to having a team, your job shifts into managing people. Not everybody. In fact, very few people got into ownership because they wanted to develop people. They wanted to manage people. That was why I expanded to an agency because I love managing people. I love developing people and building capacity and all of that but I don’t know any other agency owner that did. They only expanded to an agency because they wanted more money and they thought that was the only way to get it.

When you go from being an individual contributor to leading a team, your job shifts to managing people. Share on X

The same thing. I like managing people but I also know that there’s a whole lot of challenges that go with it. It’s another reason why I keep my team small and probably always will keep my team small. I have run a department of over 100 people and I was good at it. By the way, I grew up in that department. I used to be a department of one. I understand all of those aspects and I was super successful in doing that. I also enjoyed it. That’s not necessarily a piece but often, we forget. It’s something that will come up when I first start talking with folks is, you want to do this thing. Do you want to do this other aspect that’s going to be required to do this thing?

Which often is hiring people, managing people and employing people. It’s like, “I don’t want to do that,” and it’s like okay. That’s going to be a problem. I had a client years ago. One of my first clients. She’s like, “I want to have an eight-figure business.” By the time she had a solid six-figure business, I said, “We can do that. How do you feel about managing people?” She says, “I do not want to manage people.” I said, “When you have an eight-figure business, you can probably not manage any people but you can’t get from here to there without that.”

There’s going to have to be times that you’re going to be having to manage probably fairly large teams before you can get to a point where you’re no longer having to do that. The more that we explored it, what we realized is she just thought that that’s what success looked like. It’s because she came out of big tech that had grown fast. It was like, “If I’m not eight figures, I don’t exist.” You’re setting yourself up for massive failure. You’re going to be so unhappy. Where we ended up, she ended up having a team of two and was very successful and had everything that she wanted out of that.

It’s possible. It’s just you got to know what you want and what you’re willing to do and not do to get there. Let’s end this on a positive note, Gwen. If you can’t hand it off,  what does it look like to be the boss in a healthy way?

It’s being clear about what you have to own and saying, “I need help here but I need to own this piece.” I’m going to use myself as an example because it’s the easiest way to do it. For me, I have to own the strategy of marketing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get your advice.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t design the strategy with you.

It doesn’t mean that we are co-working on that but I’ve got to own it. I’ve got to own the strategy. I have to own the vision of what we’re trying to create and why we’re trying to create it. I have to be the one to be able to say, “I know this feels like this would be easier, but this is the harder thing that we’re going to do or I know this feels like this would be more fun, but we have to do this boring thing.” Any of those pieces.

That’s really the piece. Get comfortable if these are the things that I’ve got to own and at what level do I have to own them? The phrase that I use all the time is, there’s only two things that you as an owner are responsible for. It’s the health of your business, which means understanding what a healthy business looks like. That’s all that strategy piece.

There are only two things an owner is responsible for: the health of the business and its culture. Share on X

An Owner Must Own The Health Of The Business And The Culture

What does a healthy business look like for me and my business, and the culture? Those are the two things that you have to own. As soon as you start letting anything else go, then you are no longer leading. Back to what I said, using my example. The health of my business was starting to decline because I was owning that sales and marketing piece even though we’re a tiny team. Super tiny team. Be very clear like, “I’ve got to own that. I’ve got to own that piece.”

I am going to need you to explain the difference between ownership and control because I do think we get confused there and we get all micro-managing. What would you say is the difference between owning it and controlling it? Owning it is about making the decisions. Understanding and being able to communicate the reasons behind those decisions at a reasonable level. We don’t have to necessarily give everybody every detail about why we’re making a choice. Being able to communicate the decisions about why we’re doing things but it’s owning the decision. It’s not necessarily owning the implementation of the decision.

In terms of being able to put that on a sticky note and like, “Am I owning this or am I trying to control this?” That keeps you in that healthy space just like what I am trying to escape. That’s a good way to put on the sticky note.

Using your example way back at the beginning. You were trying to not own those decisions and as soon as you recognized them. That was the same thing. I was trying to not have to own any of the marketing decisions.

Here’s what I’m going to say as we close up is that. If you’re reading and you’re feeling like, “That kind of sounds like me. I’ve been avoiding some key decisions in my business or I keep sitting back waiting for someone around here to tell me what to do. I would love to give you a pithy little question or have Gwen give you a pithy little question you can ask yourself and journal the answer away. That’s not how these things work. It’s just not. If you do the answer, you would have done it already, honestly.

This is the situation where you need to talk to somebody else. If you’re reading, why not talk to Gwen? Why not go to www.tonyakubo.com/Clarity and hop on a call with Gwen. It’s like 30 minutes. It’s not a sales call. Although, if you want to hire Gwen, she’ll tell you how to do that. It’s about asking that question, figuring out what you’re trying to escape, and getting to the next step toward whatever the goal is that you’ve set forth in front of yourself. That brings us to the end of the What We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know series. I don’t know about you, Gwen but I’m happy to be done with this because going back in time is painful like that.

It is how we learn.

If you’re just now jumping into the series, I would encourage you to check out episode 94. The lesson there was Gwen’s, how hiring can be both blessing and curse. Also, episode 95, which was how your business model drives everything about your business. That was my painful lesson. Episode 96 was about decision filters.

This was one for Gwen about how just because of your experience and you’re smart and you know a lot doesn’t mean you don’t get sucked into what “everybody says everybody else is always doing.” We closed it up with this one talking about how you can’t outsource being the boss of your own business and what it means to be a leader. Whether you’re running a team of 1, 2, 3, 10, or 20. We want to catch you next time, where we will be talking about some other very interesting business issues that we are seeing bubbling up now.

 

Mentioned in This Episode

• Gwen Bortner on LinkedIn
• Tonya Kubo
• www.tonyakubo.com/Clarity
• What We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Know – Hiring Isn’t The Fix You Think It Is – Previous Episode
• Your Business Model Is Driving More Than You Think – Previous Episode

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.