Most leaders would rather starve their growth than let go of the fishing rod.
You know the difference between feeding someone and teaching them to fish. Yet when Monday morning arrives, you’re back at the water’s edge, casting lines for everyone else.
The math is brutal. One person needing fish becomes five, then fifteen. Your day stretches from managing tasks to managing an entire ecosystem of dependencies. The very people you hired to help scale become anchors dragging you deeper into the tactical weeds.
The Sentiment Trap
But here’s where it gets messy. Not everything should be delegated.
When your biggest client calls upset, when a key relationship needs nurturing, when the stakes involve trust you’ve spent years building—these moments require your emotional fingerprint. No amount of process documentation can transfer the weight you carry for specific outcomes.
The question isn’t whether to delegate. It’s knowing which pain you’ll choose.
Take the pain now of training someone imperfectly, watching them stumble through tasks you could complete in half the time. Accept that their version won’t match your internal standard.
Or take the pain later when your calendar owns you, when every decision flows through your desk, when the business that was supposed to free you becomes your most demanding employee.
Choose Your Constraint
Innovative leaders protect their emotional bandwidth for what truly matters. They delegate the mechanics and guard the relationships that only they can steward.
The fishing rod isn’t going anywhere. The question is whether you’re using it to feed people or to teach an entire organization how to feed itself.
Your constraint will always be you—until you decide it won’t be.
