Only 41% of professionals on the partnership track say they have a trusted group of people they regularly delegate to. This episode explores why that gap is so costly. And what to do about it.
This episode explores what effective delegation actually looks like, where it typically breaks down, and how to build the team around you that makes it possible.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why the inability to delegate is one of the most reliable ways to derail a promising partnership case, however strong your billable time is
- The difference between delegating and dumping, and the one question that tells you immediately whether your junior actually understands what they need to do
- The Mindset traps that talk talented professionals out of delegating, and why they feel so rational
- How to build a wider pool of people who actively want to work for you, so you are not left exposed when your best team members get pulled elsewhere
- What psychological safety has to do with delegation, and how to create it in a hybrid team
Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment
Free to complete, 15–20 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators, including exactly where to focus your first ONE BIG FOCUS. Take the assessment here.
Buy Poised for Partnership
To buy a copy of Poised for Partnership, click here.
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
The Progress to Partner Academy is curated by key indicators. If Delegation is where you need to focus, you’ll find everything in one place.
Inside the Delegation indicator, you’ll find practical support to help you stop holding on to too much work and start freeing up the time you need to focus on your progression.
You’ll find resources to help you delegate with more confidence and clarity, including:
- How to Get a Delegation Mindset
- How to Delegate Effectively so You Have Time to Work on Your Career
- Courageous Conversations: How to Become an Expert at Difficult Conversations
- How to Delegate Like a Pro course
Inside the How to Delegate Like a Pro course, you’ll watch four videos with practical exercises to complete after each one. By the end of the course, you will have:
- Understood how to delegate effectively
- Identified the right mindset for delegation
- Improved your ability to delegate work to others
- Built more confidence in letting go of tasks that no longer need to sit with you
These resources will help you:
- Make delegation part of how you work, not something you do only when you are overwhelmed
- Create more space for business development, leadership and career progression
- Have better conversations when work needs to be passed on, reviewed or improved
- Build the skills and confidence to develop others while protecting your own time
- Focus on the work that will move your career forward
If Delegation is where you need to focus, this section of Progress to Partner will help you stop carrying everything yourself and start creating the space, support and confidence you need to progress towards partnership.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership. Click here to join.
Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugMugM
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
She was one of the most capable senior managers her firm had. Her clients loved her. Her partners trusted her. And she was drowning. Every evening, past eight. Every weekend, at least one of the days. She was doing everything, and doing it brilliantly, and it was going to cost her partnership.
When we looked at why, the answer was uncomfortable. She wasn’t doing her own work. She was doing everyone’s work. Because she didn’t trust anyone else to do it right.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. This is episode five in our series on the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness, and today we are talking about Delegation.
New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.
Let’s start with a number. Only 41% of professionals of the 1000s of professionals who have completed our Partnership Readiness Assessment say they have a trusted group of people they regularly delegate to. Just 41%. Which means the majority — the majority — of people who are actively trying to make partner are still trying to do too much themselves.
And here is why that matters so much. If you cannot delegate effectively now, you will never get to partner. That is not a motivational line. Or something to scare you. It’s what I see in reality. A partner who does everything themselves is not a partner. They are a very expensive senior associate or senior manager.
Think about what a partner’s time is actually for. Growing a practice, Winning work. Growing relationships. Developing the people beneath them. Thinking about the long-term and short-term of where their practice is going. None of that happens when you are head-down on the same work a junior could have done, because you didn’t have time to brief them properly.
This is the trap so many talented people fall into. Not because they are lazy or disorganised. Because often the opposite, they are brilliant. The very fact that you can do the work faster and better than the junior is exactly what makes it so hard to hand over. You know it will come back needing rework. You know the client expects the best. So you do it yourself. And you stay late. Again.
So where does delegation actually go wrong?
The first mistake is what I call dumping, not delegating. Handing a piece of work to a junior without a full brief and not checking their understanding is not delegation. It is ambushing them and setting them up to fail. Most junior staff will not tell you they don’t know how to do something. After all, they don’t want to feel embarrassed when they think they should know how to do something. They will muddle along, quietly hoping they work it out before you notice. Remember you probably did this when you were a junior! Sometimes they do work it out without blowing the budget. Often, they don’t. And then you are spending twice the time unpicking the mess.
The fix is simple but most people skip it. Instead of asking “do you know what you need to do?” — to which the answer will almost always be yes, regardless of whether it is true — ask them to walk you through the first few things they will do to get started. That question cannot be faked. If they know, they will tell you. If they don’t, you will find out in thirty seconds rather than three days.
The second mistake is no contingency time. Plans change. Clients land something urgent. The junior hits an unexpected problem. If you have delegated with no buffer, the moment anything changes, you are back doing the work yourself. Build in more time than you think you need, especially with someone less experienced.
The third mistake — and this one runs deep — is Mindset. These are the beliefs that talk you out of delegating before you have even considered it:
- Only I can do this piece of work.
- The client expects me.
- It will be quicker to do it myself.
- The last time I delegated this, they made a mess of it.
Every single one of those feels entirely rational. Some of them are even occasionally true. But if you are running your career on those beliefs as a default, you will never free up the time to become the person partnerships are made of.
Now let’s talk about building the team you delegate to. Because delegation does not exist in a vacuum. You can only delegate confidently if you have people around you who are capable, motivated, and who actually want to work for you.
This is where a lot of people on the partnership track miss something important. Your team is often not really yours. And that’s if you have the luxury of ‘direct reports’ who only work for you. A senior partner can pull your best junior at any moment and there is not much you can do about it. So your job is not just to manage the team you have. It is to build a wider pool of people who actively want to work with you, across the firm, so that when your ideal team gets pulled, you are not left exposed.
Kyle was on the cusp of partner, managing a substantial client portfolio, but found that top performers were regularly poached for other partners’ work. His response was clever. Instead of fighting for the same small pool of resource, he deliberately built relationships across the firm’s wider team, prioritising a handful of people he could rely on and who genuinely wanted to be allocated to his work.
The way you build that is not complicated, but it does require intention. Take an interest in the people who work with you. Find out how they like to receive feedback. Tell them your expectations clearly — including the expectation that their first draft will come back covered in comments, and that this is normal, not a failure. Spend time with them reviewing work together rather than just sending it back corrected. See their mistakes as development, not just delays.
People work for the leaders they want to work for. Even where they don’t technically have a choice, they bring their discretionary effort when they feel seen. The person who has a loyal team beneath them moves faster, delegates more confidently, and delivers better outcomes for clients.
There is one more thing I want to cover, because it comes up constantly and it is a genuine blocker for a lot of people. That is hybrid and remote teams.
Most partnerships are now hybrid at minimum, and some of your team may be in completely different locations. Management by walking about — checking in on people physically, having a quick word at someone’s desk — does not work when people are not co-located. This means that if you are going to delegate confidently to a distributed team, you need to be deliberate about how you build trust and how you stay in touch with progress.
That means setting clear checkpoints in advance. It means agreeing how and when people should flag problems before they become crises. It means being accessible — not in the sense of being available at all hours, but in the sense of making it genuinely easy for people to come to you with a problem without feeling they are wasting your time or admitting failure.
If your team feels psychologically safe — meaning they can tell you when something is going wrong without fearing the response — you will catch problems early. If they don’t, you will find out at the worst possible moment.
Your action for this week. Look at your workload for the coming five days and identify one piece of work you are currently planning to do yourself that could be delegated. Not dumped — delegated. With a brief, with checkpoints, with contingency. Then do it.
If you want to understand where you sit across all 12 key indicators — including Delegation — the Partnership Readiness Assessment is the place to start. It takes 10–15 minutes and gives you a personalised report. The link is in the show notes below.
Inside our Progress to Partner Academy, resources are curated by key indicator. If Delegation is where you need to focus first, everything relevant is in one place.
In our progress to partner academy we have a short course on how to delegate like a pro. Plus courses on how to lead a hybrid team.
Use code **PODCAST10** for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. It helps us reach more people who need this. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode.
Thanks for listening!
Links
Complete my FREE Partnership Readiness Assessment – to see where you have gaps in your own development – you’ll get a personalised report with actions for what progress your career forward
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Join Progress To Partner Academy and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
Buy your hard copy of Poised for Partnership or buy the Ebook here
Buy your copy of How To Make Partner And Still Have A Life
Buy your copy of The Go To Expert
Buy your copy of The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking
Join my Progress To Partner Academy and access all my courses and use the code PODCASTBP10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
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