“I didn’t realize how vague I had been until this workshop. I thought I was being clear. I wasn’t.”

That was Mary Pierce, a business owner who went through the Delegate Like a Pro workshop.

She’d been handing work off for years. Her team was good. Her instructions felt clear. But the work kept coming back wrong, and she kept quietly fixing it herself.

She had a picture of what “done” looked like for every task she handed off. It was real, it was specific, it was high. But it had never made it out of her head and into the handoff.

Her team wasn’t getting it wrong because they couldn’t do the work. They were guessing because there was nothing else to go on.

They didn’t know what done looked like. Mary didn’t realize she’d never shown them. Neither one saw the gap.

That’s not a communication failure. It’s a gap that neither side could see – because neither side knew to look for it.

This shows up in ways that are easy to miss because they look like team problems.

The copywriting that came back technically correct – right length, right topic, right structure – and sounded like it could have been written by anyone. You spent an hour rewriting the voice into it. You’ve done it every time since.

The client onboarding that got followed, but the wrong things got emphasized and the right things got glossed over. The client had questions in week two that should have been answered in week one.

The proposal with all the right information and none of the right tone. The client said it felt formal. You knew exactly what that meant, rewrote it yourself, and quietly added proposals to the list of things you handle.

In every case, the person doing the work made a reasonable decision with the information they had. In every case, the owner had a more specific picture of done in her head that never got communicated. And in every case, nobody put into words what done looked like. That’s the gap that could have been closed in one sentence.

The picture that never leaves your head

Here’s what makes this so hard to catch. When you’re good at what you do, your picture of done feels obvious. Of course this is what finished looks like. It’s so clear to you that you assume it transferred when you handed the work off.

It didn’t. The handoff happened. Her picture of done stayed exactly where it always was – in her head.

This is one of the most common delegation breakdowns I see with small business owners who have teams. They’re not vague people. They’re not bad communicators. They’re working from a picture that’s never been put into words – and assuming the people around them can see the same thing.

They can’t. It was never shared.

What happens next is predictable. The work comes back wrong. The owner redoes it. Or she adds three rounds of feedback that slowly, exhaustingly inch it toward what she had in her head. She decides this particular task is too hard to hand off and quietly takes it back. Adds it to the list of things only she can do.

That list only ever grows.

Eventually she starts to believe the problem is her team. She hired the wrong person. They don’t care as much as she does. They’re not detail-oriented enough.

Sometimes those things are true. Usually they’re not. Usually the team is doing exactly what they can do with the information they have – which isn’t enough. (If you’re questioning whether it’s a team fit issue versus a work assignment issue, this post on building a Zone of Genius team is worth reading before you make any decisions.)

 

One thing to try right now

Pick one thing you’ve been frustrated your team isn’t doing well. Something that keeps coming back wrong or keeps coming back to you.

Write down what done looks like for it. One sentence. Specific enough that someone who has never done this task could read it and know whether they’ve hit the mark.

If you can’t write it, they can’t hit it.

That’s the test. Most owners who try it discover they know exactly what done looks like – they just never wrote it down. The picture was always there. It just never left their head.

This is the first phase of the DLAP framework, PREP. Before the timeline, before anything about who’s doing it, you define done. One sentence, in writing, before the task leaves your desk. Everything else builds from there. And if delegation keeps breaking down even after you’ve defined done, this breakdown of the five focus areas that fix it is a good next read.

 

The fix

The fix isn’t a new hire, better training, or a personality assessment. It’s writing down what done looks like before the work leaves your hands.

Mary changed one thing. Before every handoff now, she records a quick video for her team – this is what done looks like to me. Specific. Reusable. The work comes back right.

She didn’t need a new team. She needed to stop assuming the picture transferred automatically.

Once she wrote it down, she stopped redoing the work. And she stopped wondering if she’d hired the wrong people.

Those two things tend to disappear at the same time.

The PREP framework is one piece of a larger system. If you’re ready to build it across every handoff in your business, that’s exactly what the Delegate Like a Pro: 30-Day Sprint is for. Registration is open now: https://go.impactivestrategies.com/dlap-masterclass

 

 

 

 

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