When I hired my first analyst, her job was to own our reporting — building dashboards I had previously built myself.
Dashboards were something I genuinely loved. I could spend hours in Tableau, getting every metric, every layout, every color exactly right. It was part of my identity as an IC. So when her work came in rough, I did what felt completely natural. I asked her to send me the workbook and fixed it myself. I told myself I was being a great manager — giving her direction, keeping the output excellent.
What I was actually doing was making sure she never had to get it right on her own.
She started waiting for me to fix things instead of learning to fix them herself. I had become her bottleneck. Not her manager.
Here's what made it hard to see: I wasn't lazy. I wasn't checked out. I was over-invested. The work mattered to me. That's exactly why I couldn't let it be imperfect long enough to teach her anything.
That's the trap. Not avoidance. Over-involvement dressed up as high standards.
The belief underneath it is almost always the same: it's faster if I do it myself. And in the short term, that's true. You know the work, you know what good looks like, and watching someone struggle through a rough draft when you could fix it in twenty minutes feels genuinely inefficient.
But you're not optimizing for the output. You're optimizing for your own discomfort.
Every time you take the work back, you're making a trade. Short-term quality for long-term dependency. A better deliverable today. Zero chance for your team member to build the judgment they need for next time.
A few years later, I had a technical analyst who needed to write a one-pager explaining LTV modeling to a non-technical business audience. His first draft was technically brilliant but completely unusable for anyone without a statistics degree. Every instinct I had told me to open the document and rewrite it myself.
I didn't. I gave him feedback and sent it back. Then again. And again. Five rounds. It was genuinely uncomfortable. The timeline stretched longer than it should have.
But he got there. And the next time he had to write something similar? One round of feedback. Not five.
That's the compounding that disappears every time you take the work back.
I want to be honest about this, because I think it matters: I still feel the pull. Especially during high-stakes initiatives — big projects with a lot of leadership visibility, where you're getting peppered with detailed questions and it feels like you need to be in the weeds to stay credible. That's when the IC instinct comes back hardest. The impulse to take control is real.
Seven-plus years in, I catch it faster. But I still catch it. Awareness is most of the work.
Here's the framework I use when that urge shows up. I call it the Only You list — four things that are genuinely, actually your job as a manager:
Make decisions no one else has the context or authority to make.
Develop people in ways they can't develop themselves.
Provide perspective your team doesn't have access to.
Take organizational heat so your team can keep focusing.
Everything else is a candidate for delegation.
If what you're about to take back doesn't fit, you're not managing. You're just doing.
One thing to do this week: The next time you feel the urge to take work back — and you will — run it through the Only You list before you act. If it doesn't fit, send it back. With specific feedback. Not "this needs more work." Tell them exactly what's missing and let them fix it.
That's the job.
— Andrea
P.S. Not sure where you actually are in the transition? I built a free 5-minute assessment that shows you exactly which IC habits are still running the show — across how you execute, communicate, and delegate ownership. Nine questions. Immediate results. You can find it here.