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 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 natural. I asked her to send me the workbook and fixed it myself.
I told myself I was being a great manager — I was giving her direction and making sure the output was excellent.
What I was actually doing was preventing her from growing.
She started waiting for me to fix things instead of learning how to fix them herself. I was her bottleneck, not her manager.
The moment I stepped back — really stepped back — and started coaching her through decisions instead of making them for her, everything changed. Her work improved because she finally had room to learn, iterate, and develop her own judgment.
That story took me an embarrassingly long time to understand. And the dashboard was just one item on a very long list of things I was still doing that I shouldn't have been.
Why stopping is harder than starting
When you get promoted, everyone talks about what you need to start doing.
Start having 1-on-1s. Start thinking strategically. Start developing your team.
Nobody talks about what you need to stop.
That's the harder list. And it's the one that actually determines whether you make the transition — because the things you need to stop are almost without exception the things that made you great as an IC.
You need to stop reviewing every piece of work before it goes out — because your standards are high and it's hard to send something you didn't touch.
You need to stop solving problems directly — because you're fast at it and it feels productive.
You need to stop being the first to answer every question in a meeting — because you usually know the answer and the silence is uncomfortable.
You need to stop taking back tasks that are moving slowly — because you could do it faster and the deadline is real.
None of these are character flaws. They're the habits of someone who spent years being rewarded for exactly this behavior.
The problem is that every time you do them as a manager, you're optimizing for the wrong thing. You're making yourself faster at the expense of making your team stronger.
The cost of not stopping
When you keep reviewing everything, your team stops taking ownership of quality. The work becomes yours, not theirs.
When you keep solving problems directly, your team stops trying to solve them first. Why would they? You'll get there faster.
When you take back tasks, you signal that delegation isn't real — it's conditional. They learn that autonomy lasts only until you get impatient.
Over time, you become the bottleneck. Everything runs through you. You're busier than you've ever been, your team is less capable than they could be, and you can't figure out why management feels unsustainable.
It's not a time problem. It's a stopping problem.
How to build your Stop Doing List
Go through your last two weeks and write down every task, decision, and conversation you were involved in. Then for each one, ask one question:
Does this require me specifically — or am I here out of habit?
Most of what you find will fall into three buckets:
Things only you can do. Strategic decisions, performance conversations, representing the team to leadership, setting direction. This is your actual job.
Things someone on your team could do with some development. These are the highest-leverage items on the list. Your job isn't to do them — it's to build the person who will own them.
Things someone on your team can do right now. These are tasks you simply haven't let go of yet. There's no development needed. You're holding on out of habit — or because letting go feels risky.
The goal isn't to empty your calendar. It's to fill it with the right things. And the only way to do that is to be ruthless about clearing the wrong ones.
The part nobody talks about
I want to be honest about something, because I think it matters.
This is something I still struggle with. Seven years in.
When I'm working on something big and visible — the kind of initiative where senior leadership is watching, where the implications ripple across entire organizations, where you're in the middle of real change management with real resistance — my controlling side comes out in full force.
Recently I was leading the deployment of a new marketing attribution model. The kind of project that changes how marketing and finance operate. New methodology, new reporting, new logic that touches almost every decision downstream.
I started attending every single meeting. Not because I needed to be there. Because I was afraid of missing something. Afraid of being caught off guard in a room with a VP. Afraid of looking like I wasn't on top of it.
I also started doing work I should have delegated. I built prototype sketches of what the new reporting should look like — layouts, structures, logic — because putting pen to paper helps me think. Helps me visualize the strategy before I can articulate it.
And here's what I've learned about that: sometimes that's actually fine. Sometimes being hands-on is how you develop the direction your team needs. The prototypes weren't the problem. The problem was when I kept holding onto them instead of handing them off. What should have been a directional sketch — here's the skeleton, here's where we're headed — started becoming something I owned end to end.
The pressure from senior leadership doesn't help. Constant asks for updates. Push to move faster. When someone two levels above you is asking questions you can't fully answer yet, the instinct is to grab back control — because control feels like the answer to anxiety.
It isn't.
What actually helps is being honest with yourself about why you're in the room. Is your presence making this better — or is it just making you feel less scared?
Sometimes I catch it and quietly recalibrate. Other times I'm vocal about it — I'm transitioning this to you, here's the skeleton, you own the finish. Both work. What doesn't work is pretending the urge isn't there.
The Stop Doing List isn't a one-time exercise. It's a practice. And some weeks, you'll add the same thing back onto it that you removed the week before.
That's not failure. That's management.
One thing to do this week
Pick one item from your current week that falls into bucket two or three. One task, one decision, one meeting you're attending out of habit — or out of anxiety.
Hand it off with real context and a clear expectation. Not a vague "you've got this."
Then don't take it back.
The first time is uncomfortable. That discomfort is the work.
— Andrea
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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.