At five o'clock on Friday, a business owner is still correcting the team's report. It goes out on time. The same problem is waiting the following Friday.
This hypothetical situation raises a useful question about personal development in management. The owner may be getting better at correcting work, working faster and handling more emergencies. But if every report still has to pass through their hands, are those improved skills helping the business operate with less waiting?
Owners and managers have an endless list of things to learn, from finance and sales to AI. The problem is that new knowledge may never reach the decisions they keep postponing: whether to discontinue a loss-making service, how to address a team leader's declining performance or when to let someone else decide.
This article proposes choosing one difficult, unresolved issue and making it a place to practice. Learning becomes connected to a decision, the evidence needed and the behavior that must change at work. Some issues still deserve delay, specialist advice or a decision not to experiment.
Find out what makes the issue difficult
"I'm not ready" can conceal different problems. Some decisions lack information. Others have enough information but require a skill the manager has not developed. Sometimes the decision is already clear, but the manager wants to avoid its consequences. Treating everything as a confidence problem can lead to more study when a conversation is needed, or an early decision when essential evidence is missing.
Return to the Friday report. The owner may worry that the team cannot do it. Further questions may reveal that nobody has specified who confirms the sales figures, which data source to use or how to check the result. This uncertainty needs clearer responsibilities and conditions. Encouraging oneself to be more confident will not resolve it.
If recurring errors and clear standards are already documented, but the owner postpones a conversation to protect the relationship, the practice needed may be stating the facts, listening to the cause and agreeing on the next piece of work. Another leadership book may provide ideas. There still needs to be an actual meeting to practice the part they cannot yet do.
Before choosing how to develop, complete this sentence: "I cannot decide this yet because I still need ..." An answer that can be checked, such as actual service costs, customer information or specialist advice, makes the next step clearer. If the answer is "I'm afraid of being wrong," ask what kind of error you fear, who it would affect and how far it could be reversed.
Work without a known method needs a learning goal
"Delegate more this quarter" sounds useful but does not identify what to practice. "The team leader must produce the entire report independently by the end of the month" may push for an outcome before data, review criteria and authority are ready.
Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's research review explains that specific, challenging goals can support performance under conditions including ability, commitment and feedback. In unfamiliar, complex tasks, however, people still need to discover effective strategies. Learning goals and nearer-term goals therefore serve a different purpose from applying pressure through an outcome target alone. Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation
Applied to delegating the report, the manager might first practice writing criteria another person can use. Ask the team leader to explain which questions a good report must answer. Then review actual work together to identify unclear criteria. Once understanding is shared, expand the work the team leader can complete independently.
A learning goal still needs observable evidence. After two reporting cycles, for example, the manager should be able to identify recurring corrections and explain what they changed in the instructions or criteria. The team leader should be able to distinguish decisions they own from those requiring an answer from someone else.
Two cycles is an illustrative practice period, rather than a research-backed promise about how long skill development takes. Some work requires longer. If the underlying problem is insufficient staffing or late source data, changing one manager's behavior may not solve it.
Make the first decision small enough to learn from
Giving a team leader responsibility for the report affects information executives will use. The owner does not have to hand over every part at once. They might begin with one recurring report whose scope can be defined clearly.
Separate what is known from what remains uncertain. Known information should come from actual work: which fields the owner corrects repeatedly, which source arrives late and which errors distort decisions. The unknowns might include the team leader's ability to investigate differences between data sources or the time needed to manage a complete reporting cycle.
In the first cycle, the team leader could prepare and explain the report while the owner checks critical points before the report is used. Approval authority would initially remain in place. Having seen the reasoning and errors, the owner could decide which checks to delegate next, whether to expand the scope or which skills need more practice.
Before a trial, write down the uncertainty being tested, the evidence that will inform the decision, who is affected, what would trigger a stop and who may make that decision. Without those conditions, a trial can gradually become policy without anyone consciously deciding it should.
The result may be a decision not to expand. That is still useful information. Development here means asking better questions, collecting evidence and changing a view when the reasons change. It does not require proving the first idea correct.
Issues involving safety, people's rights or consequences that are hard to reverse may not suit the same kind of small experiment. They require appropriate authority and expertise. Handling difficult work includes recognizing where one's own knowledge ends.
Delegate authority along with the task
Back at the Friday report, an owner who says "You should be able to do it yourself next month," but still chooses the data, makes every decision and changes the format before delivery, has added responsibility without fully enabling independence.
A delegation exercise should specify the intended outcome, decision authority, accessible information and conditions for returning to the manager. A hypothetical instruction for a sales report might read:
For the next cycle, you are responsible for preparing the sales report executives use to decide customer follow-up. You may choose its presentation and arrange meetings with the relevant departments to obtain information. Use the definition of sales confirmed by Accounting. If figures from two sources differ and you have not established why by Wednesday, send the facts and options. We will discuss the unresolved decision before the report is due.
Adapt the dates, sources and authority to the actual business. The point is that the employee has room to choose how to work and knows when to return to the person delegating.
Managers also need to practice leaving work with its owner when a different method appears. Ask whether it fails the standard or simply uses an unfamiliar format. If the information is correct, answers the business question and stays within agreed boundaries, some differences can remain the employee's choice.
Incorrect information or an issue affecting an important decision still needs intervention. Independence is no reason to leave a known error uncorrected. The next question is whether the employee lacked information, skill or understanding of the criteria, so the manager does not have to correct the same problem each time.
Prepare for the moment an old habit returns
Many managers intend to delegate more, then take the work back as a deadline approaches. Correcting it immediately feels easier than stopping to explain. If choosing a new response waits until the pressure arrives, the familiar response has an advantage.
Research on implementation intentions examines plans specifying what to do when a particular situation occurs. A meta-analysis by Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reported positive effects on goal attainment across 94 independent tests. These concerned varied tasks, rather than proof that every manager's delegation will improve by the same amount. Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement
A manager might try: "If work arrives below the agreed standard, I will ask its owner to identify the problem and propose a correction before deciding whether to take it back." Another plan might be: "If the team seeks approval for something already within its authority, I will ask for its reasoning and recommendation before supplying an answer."
Build in exceptions appropriate to the work. An urgent incident or significant potential harm may require immediate intervention, followed by a review. A preplanned response gives a new behavior a starting point, but cannot replace judgment.
For a conversation postponed repeatedly, the plan could be simpler: after Monday's morning meeting, send the team leader an invitation with the discussion topic that day. Scheduling and preparing facts can begin immediately. The conversation's outcome still depends on listening and subsequent work together.
Keep lessons that change the next cycle
Completing a difficult task once does not explain how to repeat it. If a manager immediately moves to the next problem, they may remember only the effort involved or the moment their intervention saved the work.
A review after the work asks what was intended, what actually happened, why the two differed and what should change. Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli's meta-analysis found average benefits from individual and team debriefs compared with controls. Effects depend on how reviews are conducted and measured; an average across settings should not become a promise about a company's own improvement. Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance?
In the Friday-report example, the review might reveal that recurring corrections arose because the owner and team used different definitions of "sales." The next-cycle action would be confirming the definition and data source before work begins, rather than merely asking the team to be more careful.
Alternatively, employees may ask about everything because they were criticized after a previous decision, even though it fell within agreed authority. The manager needs to examine their response. Asking a team to decide independently becomes more credible when the delegator accepts reasoned decisions within the agreed scope, including occasions when results differ from expectations.
A review should end with an actual change: clarify a data definition, add an example meeting the standard, revise an escalation condition or practice a missing skill. If every review ends with "communicate better," nobody yet knows what to do differently next time.
Look for development in work that used to stall
Books read and training hours record an investment in learning. Owners should also look at actual work: has a postponed issue been decided, can the team explain its reasoning before requesting approval, and does the same type of work still return to the manager for the same reason?
Decisions do not need to become faster in every case. Higher-impact issues may deserve more time. What should become clearer is what information the executive is waiting for, who acts next and when the decision will be revisited, instead of leaving "later" on a task list without conditions.
If a company is improving workflows or considering systems work with a provider such as Enersys, delegated decisions and the information needed to make them belong in the early discussion. A system may help present information and track work within an agreed scope. Executives still need to define ownership, acceptance criteria and who decides exceptions. Actual service capabilities must be confirmed separately from this article's proposals.
Start next week with one issue postponed for too long. Write down the decision, what is missing and the first action, then set a clear date to review the result. If it concerns delegation, add one question: "Which decision am I ready to give the team, with the information it needs and a real willingness to accept the outcome within those boundaries?"
If the delegation involves AI-assisted work, continue with team decision rights, approvals and meaningful measures. The Enersys services page can help frame which process questions to bring to a discussion.
Sources and scope
- Locke and Latham, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation, American Psychologist, 2002. Used for goal-setting conditions, particularly complexity, learning goals and nearer-term goals.
- Gollwitzer and Sheeran, Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2006. The research discussion uses the accessible abstract and preview; the publisher's full chapter was not accessed.
- Tannenbaum and Cerasoli, Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance?, Human Factors, 2013. The discussion uses the original study's abstract. Cross-context averages are not treated as expected company returns.
All events, dialogue and trial examples are hypothetical. The proposed practices apply research to managerial work; the combined practice described here has not itself been tested, and is not presented as Enersys experience. Sources checked on 27 October 2026.
