Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Shannon Santanocito, Manager, UIT Service Delivery and Operations, Stanford University and a MOR alum. Shannon may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
One of my biggest leadership shifts has been around delegation and what can happen when I truly get out of the way and trust my team. Instead of seeing delegation as simply getting time back on my calendar, I’m seeing it as an act of trust that unlocks ownership, creativity, and growth.
I’ve been leaning into the idea that the answer is in the room. In practice, that has meant giving my team clear problems, outcomes, and guardrails, and then resisting the urge to jump in and do the work myself. When I do this well, I see people step forward, support each other, and arrive at solutions that fully meet (and sometimes exceed) the expectations I set. The energy on the team feels different, almost like they’ve been activated. There’s more initiative, more peer coaching, and more confidence.
Learning to Let Go
A recent example was our effort to retire a five-year-old shadow system in one of our processes. We had been talking about doing this for over a year, but progress was slow, and if I’m honest, I was often the bottleneck. I held onto the work of building ServiceNow reports, even though it was a trainable task. The turning point came when I finally trained the team and handed the work over with a clear goal and a few guidelines. When I came back, I learned they successfully retired the shadow system, and I got to watch them navigate and troubleshoot their own ServiceNow reports together, teaching and supporting each other in real time.
That moment captured the deeper benefit of delegation for me. When leaders hand over real responsibility and authority, people feel more psychologically empowered, they experience more ownership, autonomy, and confidence, and they become more proactive in seeking feedback and improving their work. I saw that play out directly; once the team owned the reports, they cared about the quality, fixed issues themselves, and leaned on each other instead of waiting for me to intervene.
Self-Restraint From Meddling
Theodore Roosevelt is attributed to the leadership quote that resonates with this experience: “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what needs done, and self‑restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” That “self-restraint” has been the real growth for me. It’s not always easy to let go. I’m realizing that when I resist the urge to meddle, I create space for others to lead.
Going forward, I want to keep building this muscle. For me, that looks like:
- Defining problems and outcomes clearly, then letting the team design the path.
- Treating delegation as a coaching moment, not a handoff, supporting without taking over.
- Noticing when I’m becoming the bottleneck and asking, “What can I teach and let go of here?”
The most rewarding part of this shift has been watching my team thrive. With a little support in the right places, and a leader who is willing to step back, they are not only delivering strong results, they are also growing their own leadership. Delegation is giving me more time to be strategic and keep our services relevant, but more importantly, it is giving my team room to lead through their own success.
Here’s to learning to delegate and getting out of the way…. happy leading!
How would you describe your recent experiences delegating?
Last week, we asked what effort will most aid your impact?
- 78% said evolve space for strategic thinking
- 8% said sharpen communication and prioritization
- 6% said connect with others
- 6% said back words with actions
- 2% said set the stage
Waiting is not a strategy. As we consider increasing the impact of our teams, evolving space for strategic thinking was by far our most common approach. How does how we spend our time, and how we ask our teams to spend their time, line up with strategic thinking being a priority? What is one thing we might do today to evolve space for strategic thinking?