Every time family visits, we perform what I’ve come to call “helpful guest theater”: the guest offers to help, the host says nothing is needed, the guest maybe offers again later in the evening, the host says thanks but no thanks and we move on. I love that they offer (and might judge a little if they didn’t) but watching someone try to help in my kitchen while spending the whole time asking where something goes or whether they’ve cut the cucumbers the right size or whatever is both annoying and inefficient (i.e., right in the center of the “things Karen hates” Venn diagram). My mother-in-law sees this less as theater and more as a challenge, complaining to my father, who will happily sit in an armchair after one empty offer, that I never let her do anything to help, ever.
That’s the thing though, the word is help. Having someone unfamiliar with my kitchen “help” in it is always more work for me or my husband. Doubly so when that person is ten inches shorter than I am and can’t reach the plates or glassware.
The dynamic mirrors other situations personally and professionally where delegation seems like it could be the answer if only it were as easy as it sounds. The act of delegating, far too often, is a project in and of itself.
In order to fully get something off your plate and hand it to someone else, you need:
Someone to hand it to. In fast-moving environments, there may not actually be a resource at all, or that resource may be overloaded themselves, or poorly trained. Having an actual fully capable and fully available person to pick up whatever baton you’re trying to hand them is a luxury, especially as more environments put pressure on organizations to run as leanly as possible.
Something ready to hand off. Often the work we’ve been doing on autopilot for years is the worst documented or the stuff you have no experience explaining to others, and the effort required to package it to give to someone else seems more time-consuming than just continuing to do it yourself (since at our busiest we’re most focused on what we can handle right now and rarely the long-term benefit). This is my primary excuse for not letting my mother-in-law help in the kitchen even though it doesn’t make sense to her.
Something with clean edges. The task is wired into work before and after it that’s still yours, so handing off the middle saves less than it looks like. When my board slides needed customer or product data, the back-and-forth with an analyst to explain what data I needed and which insights were worth sharing felt more cumbersome than doing it myself, since I owned both the questions going in and the story coming out.
AI can only solve the first need since there’s always “someone” to hand it to. However, the other two are fundamentally design problems and they’re still yours even if AI offers to help.
All three of the above compound every time someone is promoted into management and has to learn the new job while doing it, keep doing the old job, and teach someone else the old job.
Many of us end up still working on vacation because finding the person, packaging the handoff, and doing all of the related work anyway seems more burdensome than just waking up a little earlier and using subpar hotel wifi to knock something out before going on about your day. Short of cloning, coverage is something you build before you need it, not something you cobble together the Thursday before a four-day weekend.
In general, the options are:
Prepare early. Find and get potential resources ready ahead of time. Allocate time for someone to try a new task with supervision so that the first time it’s unsupervised isn’t when you’re trying to hit the beach in Cabo (or, in my case, hit the couch, under a blanket, cup of tea in hand).
Lower your standards. Not necessarily the easiest advice for control freaks (myself included) to hear, but a reality. Maybe the deliverable is missing a section or is formatted differently (even though you shared several previous versions as templates). If it’s mission-critical, it can be corrected with an apology, and if it isn’t, it may give you an excuse to reduce the scope going forward: win-win!
Drop it. Can it be skipped just once if everyone gets a heads-up? I often feel this way about summer and vacation coverage, but when multiple people are out, maybe skip the week no one is there and send one report covering both weeks? (Pro tip: file this away for Thanksgiving week!)
Decide it’s not worth handing off. Maybe this is just something that only makes sense for you to do (but please remember this is option #4 and not the default).
Being incredibly thoughtful about how you do your work should extend to the ways you don’t do it. Step back and think about the areas where you’re a single point of failure today — at work and at home — and start to get ahead of places where you can at least have temporary coverage when needed.
In the case of my mother-in-law, as much as I’d love a solution that stopped all the comments about how I never let anyone help, I looked at the options and the best one is for guests to stay out of my kitchen and on the couch where they belong.
