“You’ll Be Great at This”
Never Asks If They Want It.

Think about the last piece of work you handed to someone on your team. Maybe it was a report, or a project, or a meeting you asked them to run for you. Got one in mind? Okay.

Did you know what that person could do with it? Almost certainly. You watch their work. You know what they're good at.

Now, did you ask them how they felt about taking it on? Or did you hand it over with something like, "You'll be great at this"?

It's a kind thing to say, and it's usually true, but that line, "You'll be great at this," never asks if they want it.

What someone can do shows up in their work every day. How much they want a piece of work doesn't show up the same way. And when you hand the work over, you often don't say which decisions are now theirs to make. That's true whether you're handing work to someone new on your team or to a leader who runs a team of their own.

This is The Autistic Leader Podcast. I'm Uday Kiran Bolusani. Each week, I take one piece of advice every leader already gives, and I give you one skill that makes it work for every kind of mind.

The advice this week is one you've probably been given. "Learn to delegate."

And it's good advice. Once you learn to delegate, you stop being the bottleneck every decision waits on. And your people grow, because they get to take on real work.

So what do most leaders hear when they're told to learn to delegate? They hear, hand off tasks.

When I teach the people I lead to delegate, I add one thing. I always teach them to delegate responsibility. And a task and a responsibility are different things.

With the task, you hand over the work, and you keep the decisions inside it. With the responsibility, you hand over those decisions too. The person you hand it to makes them.

Go back to that piece of work you thought of a minute ago. Who's making the calls on it now? If it's still you, you handed off a task. If it's them, you handed off a responsibility. And did you tell them which one it was?

Now, here's what usually goes unsaid, and it's very complex. What's a task? What's a responsibility? And how do you build leaders up, depending on where they are?

The advice to learn to delegate looks very different for a new manager than it does for someone who leads other managers. Delegating responsibility matters at both levels, but when you're a new manager, and the people on your team are new to the work, you're closer to handing over tasks. As you grow, and as you grow leaders on your team, more and more of what you hand over is responsibility. And often, nobody in the organization says any of this out loud.

So who pays for that? The person you handed the work to. They're left wondering. Can I change the plan? Do I have to run it by you first? They have to work out, on their own, which decisions are theirs to make. That's cognitive load, the mental effort they spend before they can even start on the work itself.

That's why I built my Decision Charter, my framework for who makes each decision. With it, an organization spells that out at multiple levels.

Earlier in my career, I took over a team. I was its new leader. And I could see what each person was capable of. It was right there in their work. What I couldn't see was how much each of them wanted the work, or how sure they felt about it.

Now, the managers who had run that team before me, they knew how each person felt about the work. And when I took the team over, that knowledge didn't come with it.

So I assumed the best. I handed each person their work as if they wanted it, as if they felt ready for it.

That's how I led, until I understood that a leader has to assess two things. What a person can do, and how much they want the work. The lesson I took from that team was never to assume how much someone wants it.

You can make the same assumption with a team you've led for years, every time you hand someone a new piece of work.

What someone can do on a piece of work is often called their skill. How much they want it, and how sure they feel about doing it, is often called their will.

In his 1996 book, The Tao of Coaching, Max Landsberg asks leaders to judge both, for each piece of work.

Skill shows up in someone's work. Will doesn't. So a leader has to find it out. Many leaders read it by feel. They watch how the person seems when the work comes up. The person's face, their voice, how fast they say yes. Right?

I have a name for reading people by feel. I call it emotional intuition. A lot of leaders take it for emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence, the way I use the words, means asking. You ask the person how they feel, and you listen to what they tell you.

Reading by feel works well when a person's feelings show the way you expect, and often they do. But the way feelings show varies from one person to the next. When they show some other way, you can get that person wrong. And you might never find out you got it wrong.

Reading by feel can be part of how any leader works, day to day. But at a handoff, if you read someone wrong, they're the one who ends up with the work they didn't want, or didn't feel ready for.

I'm autistic, and how I feel often doesn't show the way people expect. So before I hand anyone a piece of work, I ask them how they feel about taking it on.

I adapted the way I ask from Brené Brown's 2018 book, Dare to Lead.

I lead with the question. And I let the person tell me how they feel. Getting an honest answer takes trust, and it takes time. The way I earn that trust is by asking, and then respecting the answer I get. Over and over, even when it's not the answer I was hoping for.

Any leader can do this on their own team. You need one question, and you keep asking it.

Here's how I hand off work now. Three lines. You can say them out loud, or jot them down before the conversation.

The first line is what the person can already do on this piece of work. Just this piece, the one you're handing over.

The second line is how they feel about taking it on. You ask before you share your own view of the work. That way, you don't steer their answer with what you think. And you ask the question word for word. "How do you feel about taking this on?"

The third line is the handoff itself, and you say it one of two ways. If they can't do it yet, you make it a task, in small pieces they can finish well. And you say, "This is a task. Here's what done looks like, and when I'll check in."

And if they can do it, and they want the decisions, you say, "This is yours. These decisions are yours to make, and here's what to bring back."

So that's the three lines. What they can do, how they feel, and whether it's a task or it's theirs, said out loud.

Say you're handing next quarter's customer survey to the most experienced person on your team. What can they already do? They've run that survey for the last three years.

So you ask them, "How do you feel about taking on next quarter's survey?"

And they tell you, "It feels like the same survey again. I'd want it if I could decide what we could change because of it."

Think about that. Their work would never have shown you that. Your most experienced person would want the survey if they could decide what changes because of it.

So you hand it over as a responsibility. "This is yours. You decide which questions we ask and what we recommend from the answers. Bring me the recommendation by the 15th, and you'll present it to the leadership team."

I've done this again and again as a leader, and how I handed work over depended on what each person needed for the piece in front of them.

Someone new to the work, who didn't have the skills yet? I handed them tasks, in small pieces they could finish well. I built their confidence that way, until they could learn and grow.

Someone very skilled at what they did, who was missing some other skills, or had lost interest in the work? I found ways to hand them responsibility, with the authority to make decisions. And I gave them credit for those decisions in front of other people.

And someone who could do the work, and wanted it? I made sure they knew they were supported and seen. I gave them room to do the work, and I checked in very little.

Say you run a restaurant, and the new fall menu is coming up. You'd like one of your cooks to create two of the new dishes. She's fast and careful in the kitchen. She's never planned a dish for a menu, or worked out what a plate costs to make.

You ask her, "How do you feel about taking on two of the fall dishes?"

She says, "I'd love to. I just don't know where I'd start."

So she wants it, and she's not sure yet. Those are two parts of will.

Planning a dish is new to her, so you hand her the two dishes as a task, in small pieces she can finish well. You keep the calls on price, and on which dishes make the menu. And you say, "This is a task. Here's what done looks like, and when I'll check in. For now, done means the first dish, written up with what goes in it and what a plate costs. I'll check in with you Thursday, and we'll taste it together."

Now it's your turn. Think about the next piece of work you'll hand to someone this week. Who's it going to? What can they already do on it? What will you ask them? Say it in your head, word for word. "How do you feel about taking this on?" And when you hand it over, is it a task, or is it theirs? If it's theirs, which decisions are theirs to make?

For a bigger handoff, it helps to see the decisions before you hand anything over. My AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix is my framework for which parts of the work AI can help with, and which your people keep. With that framework, you break a piece of work into steps. Then you can see the decisions inside it. AI can lay out those steps and draft the handoff two ways, once as a task and once as a responsibility. You decide which decisions the person gets.

With my Decision Charter, your organization decides, in writing, which decisions AI can help make. The people you hand work to deserve to know just as clearly which decisions are theirs, and they deserve more care than any AI.

Once you work this way, everyone you hand work to knows which calls are theirs to make. People can tell you how they feel about a piece of work, because you ask them each time you hand them work. And you make sure nobody is embarrassed or pushed aside for saying something you didn't want to hear.

In my experience, when I keep asking and keep respecting the answer, the people on my team know I care about them. So they want to do the work well. They feel valued. And over time, they care about the work too.

So, one more time. You hand off work every week. You can see what each person can do, and you're guessing at how much they want it. Most of us learned to delegate as if the person would just know which decisions were theirs. So now you ask how they feel about taking it on, and you say out loud which calls are theirs.

This week's essay on my site has three lines filled in for the survey, and a prompt that finds the decisions inside a piece of work, ready to paste into the AI your organization has approved for work.

Here's my ask. I built the show to help leaders who think differently reach senior roles, by changing how organizations are designed. Every person who subscribes is one more leader this work reaches, every week. So subscribe to the Substack and take each week's skill to your team, and follow the show wherever you're listening. A follow brings you every new episode, and it helps more leaders who think differently find this work.

So before you hand your next piece of work to someone, check what they can do on it. Ask how they feel about taking it on. Then tell them whether it's a task or a responsibility, and which decisions are theirs.