My old COO gave me a hard talk about delegation and it saved my quarter

Back in 2022, my COO at a mid-size SaaS company told me I was the bottleneck because I refused to let go of the weekly forecasting decks. He said, 'You're paying Sarah 80k a year to do this, so let her own it end to end.' I fought him on it for three weeks, then finally handed it off. Turns out she did a better job in half the time, and I freed up about 12 hours a month to focus on our actual expansion strategy. Has anyone else had a senior leader call them out on something they thought they had to do personally?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_julia5d ago

That COO sounds like a legend lol. I had a VP do the same thing to me a few years ago with client onboarding. I was convinced I had to be in every kickoff call because nobody else knew the product like I did. Turns out I was just being a control freak and my ops manager actually had better presentation skills than me. Handing it over saved me like 8 hours a week and she ended up streamlining the whole process too.

linda_clark5d ago

A buddy of mine went through the exact same thing with his reports.