The 10-80-10 Delegation Method

 

That’s how you stay in control without becoming the bottleneck.

The 10-80-10 Delegation Method The First 10%: Set the Direction Before Work Begins This is where a lot of delegation breaks.   Leaders think they are delegating because they assign the task. But handing off a task is not the same as transferring context.   If you say, “Can you take this?” and then disappear, you should not be surprised when the work comes back in a different direction than you expected.   Delegation fails when you hand off tasks without transferring context, then blame people for not reading your mind.   The first 10% is where you slow down enough to make the work clear before it begins.   This is where you define the outcome, explain why it matters, clarify the audience, name the tradeoffs, and set the decision boundaries.   Instead of saying: “Can you put together the deck?”   You might say: “We need this deck to help the leadership team decide whether to invest in this initiative next quarter. The goal is not to give them every detail. The goal is to make the tradeoff clear. I want you to show the business case, the risks, and your recommendation. Before you build the full deck, come back with the storyline and the key decision we need them to make.”   That is a very different handoff.   Now the person knows what they are solving for. They know what good looks like. They know where they have ownership and where they need input.   A strong first 10% should answer five questions: What outcome are we trying to create? Who is the audience or decision-maker? What does good look like? What constraints or tradeoffs should they consider? Where do they have decision rights, and where do they need to come back to you?   This is also where you can give examples.   Not to micromanage the exact output, but to calibrate the standard.   For example: “Here’s a deck that landed well with this audience before.” “Here’s the level of detail I’m expecting.” “Here’s what I don’t want this to become.” “Here’s the decision this work needs to support.”   And if the work is complex, don’t rely on a rushed Slack message and hope for the best.   Record a quick Loom walking through the context. Send a voice note explaining the business goal. Share a rough outline. Give them the strategic ingredients before you ask them to cook the meal.   This is the part many leaders skip because they are busy. Then they spend five times longer fixing the work later.   The first 10% is not extra work. It is how you prevent rework.   The Middle 80%: Let Your Team Own the Work This is the hard part for high achievers. Because once the work is in motion, you will see things you would do differently.   Someone will write a sentence you don’t love.   They will make a slide too complicated. They will miss a nuance. They will take longer than you would.   And every instinct in your body will want to jump in and fix it.   But this is the moment that matters. Because the middle 80% is where your team builds judgment.   If you take the work back every time it gets messy, you are not building leverage. You are building dependency.   That was the lesson my employee taught me.   Fixing the work is not the same as developing the person. If you want people to grow, they need feedback, not for you to rescue them.   That does not mean you stay completely out of it. This is where people misunderstand delegation.   You are not throwing the work over the wall and hoping for the best. That is not leadership. You still need checkpoints. But the checkpoints should force better thinking, not create more dependency.   I like to think about the middle 80% in three checkpoints.   Checkpoint 1: The Direction Check Before they go too far, ask them to bring you the outline, storyline, plan, or initial recommendation.   This is where you want to catch direction issues early. Not after they spent two weeks building the wrong thing.   The goal is to confirm they are solving the right problem. This is how you catch the big issues before they become expensive.   Checkpoint 2: The Decision Check The second checkpoint is about tradeoffs.   At this stage, you are not asking, “Did you do the task?” You are asking, “How are you thinking about the work?”   This is where you build judgment.   Ask: “What options did you consider?” “What did you rule out and why?” “What tradeoff are you making?” “Where do you need a decision from me?” “What would you recommend if I were not in the room?”   That last question is especially important.   Because if someone can only move when you tell them what to do, they are not building decision-making capacity.   The middle 80% is where people learn to think like owners. But they only learn that if you ask them to bring opinions, not just updates.   Checkpoint 3: The Risk Check The third checkpoint is about what could derail the work.   This is where you ask: “What could go wrong?” “Who needs to be aligned?” “Where might we get pushback?” “What are we underestimating?” “What would make this fail?”   This is where you help your team think beyond the task and start thinking about execution, influence, and risk.   That is the kind of thinking senior leaders notice. And it gives you visibility into the work without forcing you to become the person doing all the work.   Instead of saying, “Send it to me and I’ll clean it up,” you can say: “Bring me the recommendation and the tradeoffs you considered.” Or “Walk me through how you got there.”   This keeps you close enough to guide the work, without becoming the person who owns every detail.   Because if your team always waits for you to fix, approve, rewrite, or rescue the work, you are not leading through others yet. You are just doing lower-level tasks with an executive salary.   The Final 10%: Review for Judgment, Not Perfection The final 10% is where your leadership still matters. You are not abandoning the work. You are changing the altitude of your involvement.   At this stage, your job is not to rewrite every sentence or rebuild every slide. Your job is to pressure-test the thinking.   This is where you move from editing to elevating.   Editing says: “I would write this differently.”   Elevating says: “The recommendation is buried.” “The risk is not clear enough.” “The business case needs to be sharper.” “The story is too tactical for the room it is going into.”   The first makes your team frustrated. The other makes the team better.   When you review the final 10%, use a simple executive filter: Is the business question clear? Is the recommendation easy to understand? Will this land with the decision-maker? Does this solve the problem?   This is where your experience creates leverage.   You are not there to prove you could have done it better. You are there to make the work sharper, clearer, and more useful. That may still require edits. But the way you respond matters.   If you fix everything yourself, your team learns that your standard exists somewhere inside your head and the only way to reach it is to let you take over.   If you give clear feedback, they learn how to think at a higher level next time. Thats how you empower your people and scale the work, which the proof point senior executive look for when evaluating VPs.   Why This Matters for VP Readiness If every project still depends on your personal involvement, you may be seen as valuable, but not scalable.   At VP level, the surface area is too large for you to personally touch every decision, every project, and every deliverable.   You cannot be the smartest person in every room, the backup plan for every team problem, and the final editor of every important document.   Your value has to come from setting direction, building leaders, creating systems, making decisions, and raising the quality of thinking across the organization. That is the real promotion signal.   And this is why “it’s faster if I do it myself” is such a dangerous trap. It might be faster today.   But if you keep doing that, you are borrowing against your future capacity.   Eventually, the bill comes due. Usually in the form of burnout, team dependency and missed growth opportunities

Your Next Steps The next time you catch yourself thinking, “It’s just faster if I do it myself,” pause. Look at the project and run a quick 10-80-10 audit.   Start with the first 10%.   Before you hand off the work, ask yourself: Have I explained the business outcome? Have I clarified what good looks like? Have I given examples, a walkthrough, or enough context to calibrate the standard?   Then look at the middle 80%.   Ask: Am I letting them own the work, or am I stepping in every time it gets uncomfortable?   Then review the final 10%.   Ask: Am I giving feedback they can use to improve? Or am I training them to wait for me?   That is how you stop being the bottleneck. And that is how you start operating like someone who is ready for bigger scope.