What to delegate first
Delegate decisions before tasks. Most founders do the opposite — they hand over the doing and keep the deciding, which is why the workload never drops and the business still stops when they do. The order that works is: decisions, then judgement, then relationships, then finally the tasks nobody wanted in the first place.
The delegation order
Decisions with a number attached
Spend below a threshold, discounts within a band, hiring inside an approved plan. Objective, bounded, and the fastest volume off your desk.
Recurring judgement calls
Scope disputes, priority conflicts, quality decisions. Slower to hand over because they need standards written down — which is the real work.
Relationships
Key clients and suppliers, moved deliberately with a named owner and a proper introduction. Never by silent absence.
Tasks
Last, not first. Once decisions have moved, most of the remaining tasks turn out to belong to whoever now owns the decision.
Why delegating tasks first fails
Hand over a task while keeping the decision and you have not removed work — you have added a handover. The person does the doing, then returns to you for the choosing. Your calendar fills with approvals instead of activity, and the business is no less dependent on you than it was. This is the mechanism behind the founder bottleneck: not too little delegation, but delegation at the wrong altitude. The full anatomy is in why most founders become the bottleneck.
How to find your first delegation targets
Log a fortnight of interruptions
Every question that reached you. Two weeks is enough — the same handful of categories will repeat.
Sort them into decisions and tasks
Most will be decisions wearing task clothing. “Can I order this?” is a decision. “Please order this” is a task.
Put a number on the decisions
Whatever recurs and carries a value gets a threshold and an owner on the Threshold-Based Authority Map. That single page removes more from your desk than a year of good intentions.
Write the standard for the judgement calls
What good looks like, where the line sits, what triggers escalation. Judgement is delegable — but only once the standard exists outside your head.
Move relationships on a plan
Named owner, joint meeting, explicit handover to the client. Relationships that transfer by silence come back as complaints.
What to keep
Stepping back is not the same as disappearing. Four things should stay with the founder well past the point where everything else has moved: the direction of the business, the standard of what it produces, decisions above the top threshold, and the development of the leadership team itself. Everything else is a candidate. Founders who try to delegate the standard end up with a business they no longer recognise; founders who refuse to delegate anything below it never get their time back.
If handing something over feels like relief, it was probably a task. If it feels like risk, it was a decision — and that is the one worth moving, with a threshold and an owner attached.
Where this fits
Delegation order is one part of the wider sequence: install Financial Visibility so thresholds can be set from real numbers, define authority, hand the leadership rhythm to someone else, and give every outcome a named owner through Outcome Governance. When the load genuinely exceeds one person, the next move is hiring a second-in-command — into a role that now has something real to own. The whole arc is covered in how to step back from your business.
Frequently asked questions
What should a founder delegate first?
Recurring decisions that carry a number — spend below a threshold, discounts within a band, hiring inside an approved plan. They are objective, easy to bound with a financial threshold, and they represent the largest volume of interruptions reaching most founders. Tasks come last, not first.
Why does delegation not reduce my workload?
Because you have delegated the doing and kept the deciding. The work returns to you as an approval instead of an activity. Delegation reduces load only when the decision moves with the task — which requires defined thresholds and a named owner, not more trust.
What should a founder never delegate?
Four things: the direction of the business, the standard of what it produces, decisions above the top financial threshold, and the development of the leadership team. Everything below that line is a candidate for delegation once structure exists to support it.
Still the first person asked about everything?
The Operational Clarity Call is a focused 30-minute structural assessment — what is actually reaching your desk, and which decisions should move off it first.
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