At a Glance
- A plan only you can see can only be carried out by you.
- It costs you the plan, your time and your team's ability to act.
- Tell a small group you trust before it is too late to matter.
- Hand over the part only you do, over and over.
- Write down enough for someone else to act, not every step.
You know what is in motion. Some of it is nearly done, some of it stalled two weeks ago, and one or two things are quietly dead. You are the only one who can tell which is which. I have been the person holding it together, so I know how it happens. I run Northlight Advisory Services, and I came to it from running operations inside organizations, so I have been on both sides of this. And I know what it costs, because I have paid it three different ways.
What does it cost when the plan only lives in your head?
Three things: the plan itself, your time, and your team's ability to act. If only you can see it, only you can carry it out.
The first cost is the plan. I once had a plan in my head for changing how an organization worked. A small group of us had thought it through carefully, and I held the notes and the pieces. It was a thinking process, a planning process, and it was exciting.
It came months too late. Things changed, and the plan could not go ahead. The people who took on the work next did not know about my plan, and at that point they certainly were not interested in my ideas. I sat through meeting after meeting holding something very few people had. The person who needed to say yes did not know about my plan or my idea. Trust had broken, and no one was going to tell them.
The change still had to happen. When it finally did, it was about a year later than it should have been.
Here is what I took from it. Waiting did not make the decision easier, and keeping it to myself did not help anyone. When something big is being considered, people need to hear that concerns are being weighed and that their feedback is going to the right place. Being open about that builds trust all around.
Who do you tell first?
A small group of people you trust, who will think it through with you instead of agreeing because you want to do something.
If I were telling a founder what to do first, this is it. Find a group of trusted people you can talk to. Lead out of a team. A team forces conversations to happen. If they are the right people, they are not just saying yes because you said you wanted to do something. They really think it through.
Then say it out loud: we need to make this decision, and I am struggling with it.
My plan stayed in my head until the people who could have used it were no longer in the room. Silence like that is common. Research from Harvard Business School finds that when people judge speaking up to be unsafe or futile, they say less, so what a leader most needs to hear can stay unsaid. Telling the right people early is how you stop it.
What should you hand over?
The part only you do, over and over. A recurring job that always waits for you is the first thing to teach someone else.
The second cost is your time. A plan that lives in your head usually comes with work that lives there too: the jobs only you know how to do.
For a long time, I was the person who got a recurring set of data ready to be imported into our CRM.
Every time, I exported the data, cleaned it up and built the upload files. A regular round took anywhere from one to eight hours. A big one could take a week.
While I was doing that, I was not doing strategic work, which was part of my job. The people who owned the work did not have the time or the training. So the data went in slowly, and that held up everything that depended on it: contacting people, follow-up messages, and accurate reports at the end of a quarter.
Eventually, two people on my team were trained well enough and had the capacity. I still reviewed their work. One of them enjoyed it, and took over most of it. That gave me back time for strategy, planning, documentation, reports and supporting the rest of the team. It was a big reduction in stress.
It fits what Paul Nutt found in a 2002 study of more than 400 decisions. Decisions made by involving the people affected succeeded more than 80% of the time, yet that approach was used in only about one decision in five.
How much of it has to be written down?
Enough for someone else to act on it. Not every step.
The third cost is your team’s ability to act. Handing something over only works if the next person can pick it up, and that takes some writing.
On a recurring process, we once mapped every step. There were about 130 of them. It was too detailed, and once it went into a task tool it was overwhelming. People asked what was supposed to be theirs and what was someone else’s.
There was pushback from the beginning.
So we grouped steps together and built standard processes. One task on the list might hide seven things for one team or twenty for another, and they knew what was inside it. Twice a year, each of us checked with our people and we talked as a group about what was and was not working. Then we edited the document together.
It ended up at about 35 tasks. It worked because there were SOPs behind the tasks, and each task had a description that carried the information. Nobody had to tick off a long checklist. The SOPs were embedded, so the information was there when they opened the task.
For example, a task called “Send the monthly status update” holds the list of what goes in it, where each number comes from, who receives it, and a link to the SOP. Whoever opens it can start without asking you.
That is the version of getting it out of your head I would aim for. Not a complete record, but a plan someone else can pick up. I wrote about what happens when a hire does not clear the bottleneck if that is where you are.
What would I do first?
Tell a small group, hand over the part only you do, and write down enough for someone else to act. In that order.
- Write down what is in motion, what has stalled and what is quietly dead.
- Tell a small group you trust, and say what you are struggling with.
- Pick the recurring job that always waits for you, and teach it to someone.
- Write it down as tasks with the information built in, so someone else can start without you.
- Give each decision an owner, so someone other than you knows what the next call is, and agree what “done” looks like.
Bain’s work on decision roles points the same way: one person holds final authority and commits the organization to act, and too many people giving input slows decisions down.
If this sounds like your week, the Alone at the Top page describes how I work with someone in this spot, and you can get in touch when you are ready to talk it through.