The Second Person to Do the Job
Picture a kitchen drawer that only one person in the house knows how to close. It sticks a little on the left, so you have to lift it as you push. Everyone else slams it, jiggles it, or leaves it open an inch, and the person who knows the trick sighs and closes it properly. That person is usually a bit proud of knowing. They shouldn't be. The drawer is broken, and their knowledge is the only reason nobody fixes it.
Most workplaces are full of drawers like that. A report that only one analyst can run because the spreadsheet has a hidden column. A deploy that works if you do the steps in a certain order and pause after step four for no documented reason. The person who holds the trick feels indispensable, and in a narrow sense they are. They are also stuck.
"If you want something done right, do it yourself." I've heard it said as a joke and as a creed, and I think it does more quiet damage than almost any other piece of workplace advice. Not because it's false. Often it's true, at least the first time. The trouble is what it costs over a year.
The first handoff is supposed to go badly
When you hand a task to someone new, the result will probably be worse than yours. Slower and a little clumsy, missing a step you didn't think to mention because you stopped noticing you did it years ago. This is the moment most people take the work back. They fix the output, maybe without saying anything, and quietly conclude the experiment failed.
It didn't fail. It produced information. Every mistake the second person makes points at something that lived only in your head: the column nobody labeled, or that pause after step four, which turns out to exist because a cache needs thirty seconds to clear. You can't write those things down in advance because you don't know they're there. Someone has to trip over them.
So after a bad first handoff, skip the question of whether they can do it. Ask what they didn't know. Write the answer somewhere a stranger could find it, then hand the task over again. The second attempt is usually fine. The third is often better than yours, because the new person hasn't yet learned to ignore the parts that never made sense.
Write down the why
Handoff documents tend to be lists of steps. Click here, export that, rename the file with today's date. Steps are fine until something changes, and then the person following them has nothing to reason with. One sentence of purpose holds up better than ten sentences of procedure. "We send this on Thursday because finance closes its week on Friday morning" lets someone handle the week when Thursday is a holiday. "Send on Thursday" does not.
I'm honestly not sure how much to write. Too little and the next person flounders. Too much and nobody reads it, and a document nobody reads is just a tidier version of the trick in your head. My rough rule is to write the reasons in full, keep the steps short, and let the second person rewrite the document after their first attempt. They now know where it was confusing. You never will.
Handing off work you're good at stings a little. It feels like giving away a piece of your reputation. If the report was known as yours, and now someone else runs it, and it comes out fine, what was special about you? Uncomfortable question. My best answer is that the report was never the special part. Your judgment about which reports were worth running was, and that judgment has nowhere to go while your afternoons disappear into a spreadsheet with a hidden column.
Imagine a team lead who is the person everyone goes to. She's fast and careful, and she says yes. Within a year she's the bottleneck for six processes. She knows it, and she tells herself she'll document things once it calms down. It never calms down. It can't, because the calm would have to come from the very work she hasn't handed off. When she takes a week of vacation, three things stall, and people praise her for being so essential. That praise is the drawer again.
Doing it yourself is a perfectly sensible choice for a task you'll do once. For anything you'll do every week, it's a loan against your own future time, at a terrible rate.
A smaller version of this plays out at home. Whoever always loads the dishwasher "the right way" has made themselves the dishwasher loader for life. Maybe that's a trade they're happy with. Still, it was a trade, and most of us never noticed agreeing to it.
I don't think the answer is to delegate everything or to stop caring about quality. Some work deserves your hands on it, and a few tasks really are better left with the one person who understands them. But I'd push back on the reflex: that small lurch of seeing someone else's slightly worse result and reaching to take it back. Let the worse result stand for a week. Ask what they didn't know. Then go fix the drawer.
Jonathan Endicott (Jonathan Weston Endicott) is an entrepreneur and creator who writes about building, momentum and discipline. More at about Jonathan Endicott, on Instagram at @jonathanwendicott and at linktr.ee/jonathanwestonendicott.