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I know you've been told to delegate more. You've probably tried maybe more than once, and probably with more than one person, and somehow the work keeps finding its way back to you. Here's what nobody tells you. Delegation by itself doesn't work. It's just a slower version of doing it yourself. The problem is probably not your willingness to hand things off. The problem is that you've handed things off into a system that has no place for them to land. That's what I'm going to talk about in today's episode.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast, where we name what's really happening inside growing nonprofits and what it actually takes to design a high impact nonprofit the right way. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage, longtime nonprofit strategist and coach. Each week I unpack the systems, strategies and specific mindset shifts that help growing nonprofits get smart and intentional about growing their impact without burning out along the way. This show is about moving beyond grit to design. It's about building organizations that have the systems, structures and leadership capacity to truly
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hold the weight of their mission.
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Welcome.
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Picture your Last week How many times did something come back to you that you thought you had already handed off? A decision that, quote unquote needed your input? Or a question that you know someone could have answered themselves? A situation that somehow circled back to your input for your sign off? This is a pattern I want to talk about today. Most nonprofit leaders I work with have tried delegation. Some of them have tried it repeatedly with multiple people across multiple years. They've read all the books, they've done the management trainings, they've had the tough conversations, and it's not sticking right. Work keeps coming back to them. They are still the glue holding things together and the unwilling bottleneck holding things up. Here's what I want you to hear right at the top of this episode. Advice about delegation isn't wrong. And yes, it does work for you. You are capable of delegating. It is real. Delegation is real and it matters. It is a really important part of how any team holds and sustains impact at scale. But delegation by itself is often missing the one structural element that actually makes it work. What's missing is decision rights. And if you've never heard that term or you've heard it and think it's sort of jargony or wonky, just stay with me. Because the absence of this one design element effectively implemented is almost certainly a huge part of the reason your organization keeps producing more work for you instead of less. So delegation versus decision rights. They are not the same thing. Delegation is an act. You hand something off. I used to run track. I use this reference in my coaching group a lot. I used to run track and I ran relays. So you run and then you pass a baton behind you to this, to the next person, right? In the relay chain. And the idea is that person is lockstep with you. They are running just as fast. They have aligned their pacing and their cadence with yours. They are ready to receive the baton. And as soon as you pass the baton, you slow down because you know that the person who's received the baton has got it from here. Right? That's good delegation. You hand something off and you say, this is yours. Now you take it from here. It's a really important management behavior and skill and it requires initiative every single time. Right. I have a tool that I will link to in the show notes called the delegation ladder. Delegation is a series of intentional steps, right? We can talk about delegation. It is. It is a series of acts that you have to take. Okay. Decision rights are architecture. They are a predefined answer to the question, what is each role empowered to resolve? Without asking. Decision rights are about autonomy and authority and how we treat failure and lines of accountability. They don't require you to hand anything off because the authority to act is already built into the role. It's a design element at the the root of the roles on your team. It's not a management act. It's what makes delegation work. You can delegate endlessly for years. You can pass a baton, you can toss the baton. You can do it consistently with the best intentions and never once install decision rights. And if that's what's happening, the result is almost always the same. The work escalates back to wherever authority actually lives, implicitly or explicitly. Which in the absence of decision rights, is going to be the executive director, right? Or whoever is highest in a workflow. Think of it this way. The delegation is like telling someone they can drive the car. Decision rights are actually giving them a license, their own set of keys and a destination. One is permission in the moment, the other is the structural capacity to act on that permission. So what more often happens inside organizations? What you may be seeing, what I call escalation, is not what you may think. Here's the thing that gets misread consistently when your team keeps escalating decisions back to you is almost never because they're not competent or overly cautious or often it's not that they don't trust themselves. It's because they're making a rational calculation inside the system that they're living in. In the absence of clearly articulated and defined decision rights, the cost of making a wrong call can be genuinely high, even if that's not named. Part of decision rights is about how we treat failure inside an organization. And these are often not things that are named, right? These are implicit cultural norms. If a staff member makes a decision that technically wasn't theirs to make, even if it was the right call, they can risk conflict with another team member. They can risk having their work undone or a quiet hit to their personal relationships. Working relationships inside the organization. And that can feel very real, even if it's not conscious. The cost of asking, on the other hand, is low. It's a brief delay to them, right? Maybe a short email, a brief conversation knocking on your door, hey, will you check this out? So they ask every time. That's the habit that is built. Those are the norms that are built to protect themselves from these other deeper costs, because asking is the correct move, given the system they're operating in, the tacit system of norms they're operating in. That's just one example, right, of what can be happening. So I want you to sit with that, right? What are the norms? What is the implied set of rules? What is the system that your team is functioning with? Right? And is it in fact creating a set of situations where escalation is the right move? Right. It is the rational move. I want you to sit with the question of whether delegation is the thing that's failing or if perhaps the team is actually functioning rationally inside a poorly designed system. So the escalation isn't a team problem or a competency problem or a character problem. It's a design signal. So there's a version of this that is harder to say out loud, but I'm going to say it anyway. Some CEOs that I work with are the cause of the escalation. They're exhausting trusted by, and it's not because of bad intentions, and it's not because they're micromanagers at heart. I just had three of these conversations in a row where I said to the person that I was coaching, you aren't actually a micromanager. You don't have a system that will support your ability to hand off what you want to hand off. And that's not about you, and it's not about your team. It's about the structure, right? So these CEOs are sending implicit signals that make autonomous decision making feel risky. Here's what this looks like. Sometimes correcting a decision that was technically within someone else's scope, weighing in on something that should have been resolved two levels below you, being so reliably responsive, so quick, so good at answering questions, always available for people to knock on your door, that your team has learned to generate questions rather than develop judgment. Do you see how each of these are small things? They are small things that are not villainous. They're not even particularly micromanaging. They are often how organic relationships have developed on teams. Most of them come from genuine care, genuine expertise, genuine responsiveness. But they quietly teach the org that authority lives with you. And once that's learned, it's very hard to unlearn through delegation alone. Rewiring this requires changing both the architecture and the behavior. The design has to change. You actually need to define and communicate decision rights, and the behavior has to change. You have to stop answering questions that aren't yours to answer, and you can't do one without the other. The design without the behavior just creates confusion, and the behavior without the design just creates anxiety. So here's the framing that I use with leaders that I work with, and I'm offering it to you because it seems to be helpful to them. Decision rights aren't just about what someone is allowed to do. That's level one, right? At a deeper level, decision rights are about what someone is expected to do without asking what is truly theirs. There is a real and meaningful difference between you can decide this and this is yours to decide. And I don't need to be in the loop unless X threshold is crossed, right? The first is permission. The second is ownership architecture. And you see, built into that is what are the thresholds, what are the decision frames? What are the priorities I expect you to adhere to, right? When you're building out decision rights, those things become named and people understand what they truly hold. Permission by itself produces hesitation in slightly different forms, right? The person with permission is still asking themselves, is this a case where I should use my authority? Should I? Should I just check in anyway? You know, better to be safe. Ownership produces accountability. The person with ownership knows this is mine. I am expected to handle this. The decision lands here. The buck stops with me. It rises and falls with me. When you redesign towards ownership, what decision rights allow you to do? When you redesign towards ownership is shift three things. First, your team stops asking because the system has told them clearly what they hold. There's nothing to ask. Second, you stop answering because the design has removed you from those decisions. And Third, the work actually has somewhere to land other than your inbox. It is clear who is responsible for it. So I want you to think about delegation as a behavior change and a really important management behavior and behaviors are valuable, but by themselves they are limited. Right? You can become a meaningfully better delegator, more consistent, more explicit, more generous with what you hand off. And it'll be help. It'll be good. But design architecture is a design change. It changes the structure that behavior operates inside. When the design is right, the default outcome is distributed authority. Not because you remembered to delegate, but because the system routes work by itself naturally to its natural actual owner. Delegation requires ongoing discipline to maintain, but when it's paired with design architecture, authority and autonomy compound. Every time a decision gets made without escalating to you, your team's capacity to make the next one grows. What that means is that your organization gets smarter, your systems get stronger, and you get freer, but only if the design is in place. So the question I'd invite you to sit with after this episode is this. Are the things that keep coming back to me actually mine to decide? Are they mine by default, or have we not built a system that actually explicitly makes other people understand what they own and what they hold? What part of this is about delegation and what part of this is about decision rights architecture? So if this episode is hitting close to home, you may have recognized your organization in any part of what I described today. The first thing I do is take the growth readiness check. Brookerichybabbage.com fitcheck it's designed to show you exactly where your structural gaps are, including thinking about your capacity architecture. And if you're leading a seven figure organization and you know this isn't a quick fit, right, you're looking at some real redesign and how authority and accountability are structured. That's exactly the work we do inside the Next level nonprofit mastermind. Complete the growth readiness check, and if you're a good fit for the mastermind, you'll get an invite to a clarity. Call with me, workwithchubbabbage Fitcheck that's it for this week and I'll see you back here next week. Thanks for listening.
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If this episode resonated, leave a review. I read them and they do matter. And make sure you're subscribed. So subscribe that you never miss a deep dive into building your resilient nonprofit. And finally, if you're ready to move from grit to good Design, head to brookrichybabbage.comStrong to take the 90 second quiz and find out where to start.