You can't delegate to someone who hasn't been coached

"This is why I have to do everything myself."

Sound familiar?

It comes out in different forms. Sometimes it's resigned, exhausted - the sound of someone who's been fighting the same battle for years and has given up hope that it will ever change.

Sometimes it's frustrated, sharp - directed at a team member who just handed back work that missed the mark for the third time.

Sometimes it's almost a whisper to themselves, as they sit down at 9pm to redo something that should have been done right the first time.

The feeling underneath is always the same: I am alone in this. Nobody else can do what I do. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done right.

And the conclusion that follows is always the same too: the team is the problem. They don't get it. They're not capable. Maybe I hired wrong. Maybe good people just don't exist. Maybe this is just what running an agency means - carrying everything yourself, forever.

I want to offer you a different explanation.

What if the team isn't the problem? What if you are?

There's a framework I use when thinking about how to develop people. It has four stages:

Micro-manage. Support. Coach. Delegate.

I know, you hear the word "micro-manage" and recoil. It sounds bad. It sounds like the kind of boss nobody wants to be - hovering, controlling, unable to trust. So you skip it and jump straight to delegation.

You hire someone, give them the task, and wait for the work to come back.

When it comes back wrong - missing the mark, not up to standard, requiring significant rework - you get frustrated. "I explained what I wanted. Why can't they just do it?"

So you either take the work back and do it themselves, or you try again with lower expectations, or you conclude this person isn't right for the role.

What you don't realize is that delegation is the final stage. It's earned, not assumed. And you can't get there without going through the stages that come before.

Let me explain what each stage means.

Micro-management is exactly what it sounds like - close oversight, detailed instruction, frequent check-ins. You're watching the work happen. You're correcting in real-time. You're not giving someone a task and waiting for the output; you're guiding them through the task step by step.

This stage exists because someone new to a task doesn't know what they don't know. They don't have the mental models yet. They don't have the pattern recognition. They can't distinguish between a decision that matters and one that doesn't. They need you close.

Support is the next stage. The person has done the task a few times with your close guidance. Now they can do it with less oversight, but they still need you available. They're going to hit situations they haven't seen before. They're going to have questions. They need to know you're there, ready to help when they get stuck.

This stage is about building confidence. They're doing more of the work independently, but with a safety net. You're not watching every step, but you're checking in regularly. You're catching mistakes before they reach clients.

Coaching comes next. Now the person is competent at the task. They can do it without your constant involvement. But they're not yet excellent. They're not yet able to handle the edge cases, the unusual situations, the moments that require judgment rather than process.

Coaching is about developing that judgment. You're not telling them what to do anymore - you're asking questions that help them think through problems themselves. You're debriefing after difficult situations. You're helping them see patterns they might have missed. You're building their ability to navigate complexity without you.

Delegation is the final stage. The person is fully capable. They can handle the task, including the edge cases, without your involvement. You can hand something off and trust that it will come back done right - or that they'll flag it if something unexpected comes up.

This is where most agency owners want to start. But you can't. The progression matters.

If you skip the above stages:

You hire someone with experience and assume they can be delegated to immediately. After all, they've done this work before. They should know what they're doing.

But they haven't done this work at your agency. They don't know your standards. They don't know your clients. They don't know the unwritten rules, the preferences, the things that matter to you that you've never articulated because they seem obvious.

So you delegate. The work comes back wrong because they were set up to fail. They were asked to perform at stage four when they needed to start at stage one.

Or you hire someone junior and try to coach them. But coaching assumes a foundation of competence that doesn't exist yet.

You're asking questions to develop their judgment, but they don't have enough experience to have judgment. They need micro-management first - close guidance, detailed instruction, the chance to see how the work is supposed to be done.

Or you provide support to someone who's ready for delegation. You're checking in too often, reviewing work that doesn't need review, hovering over someone who's earned the right to be trusted. They feel smothered. Their growth stalls. Maybe they leave.

Every stage has its place.

The skill is knowing which stage each person needs, for each type of task, at any given moment.

And to unfortunately add more complexity: someone might be at different stages for different tasks.

Your account manager might be ready for full delegation on client communication -they've done it hundreds of times, they know your standards, they can handle anything that comes up. But they might need micro-management on financial conversations with clients, because they've never done that before.

Your designer might be at the coaching stage for standard projects, but need support on a new type of work you've just started offering.

It's a person-task combination. And it changes over time as they develop.

The exhaustion you feel - the sense that you're the only one who can do things right - often comes from a mismatch.

You're trying to delegate to people who haven't been coached. You're trying to coach people who haven't been supported. You're expecting stage-four performance from people who are at stage one.

And when it doesn't work, you conclude that the problem is them.

But the problem is the progression. You skipped steps that can't be skipped.

This is hard to hear, I know.

It's easier to believe the team is the problem. It's easier to believe that good people are impossible to find, that you just have to accept doing everything yourself, that this is the burden of ownership.

But if you accept that, nothing changes. You stay exhausted forever. You stay resentful forever. You stay trapped in a business that can't run without you.

The alternative is to take responsibility for the progression. To accept that developing people is a skill - one that can be learned, one that has a structure, one that produces results when done right.

The team isn't the problem. The progression is the problem.

If you're caught in this trap - doing everyone's job because it's faster than teaching them, click here to book in a call with us and let's talk about what it would look like to build a team that performs without you.

Nick