Delegate the How

When you’re accountable for the outcome, letting go of the “how” feels risky.

If the team takes a wrong turn or misses a date, you’ll be the one explaining.

Still, trying to own every move will burn you out, disenfranchise your team, and likely leave better solutions undiscovered. Instead, define the destination; they determine the path to get there.

What to Own

• The What. Define success: the metric(s), the target, the customer or stakeholder change, the due date, and a crisp “definition of done.”

• The Why. Give the strategic context so people can make smart trade-offs without guessing your intent.

• The Pre-Approvals. Hand the team a decision-making toolkit up front:

  • Guiding principles: e.g., “customer impact over internal convenience,” “speed beats polish,” “protect brand promises.”

  • Constraints: budget, timeline, legal/brand standards, technical do-nots.

  • Priority trade-offs: what wins when two good things conflict (e.g., reliability > novelty; accessibility > visual flourish).

With those pre-approvals, the team can move without waiting for you, confident they’re inside the lines you set.

Checkpoints That Respect Autonomy

Stay engaged without micromanaging by designing a process that surfaces risk early without hijacking the work.

• Early alignment review. Validate the approach against the outcome and pre-approvals before any implementation begins.

• Thin slices, fast. Have quick feedback checkpoints of small samples, pilots, or one-pagers over big decks. Short feedback loops beat long post-mortems.

• Risk radar. Keep a live list of top risks, owners, and next tests. Review it briefly each checkpoint.

• Exception path. Define what truly needs your sign-off (e.g., brand/legal) so everything else can flow.

Questions That Guide Without Grabbing the Wheel

Use prompts that sharpen thinking instead of prescriptions that replace it:

• What’s the most meaningful early deliverable we can show by the next checkpoint that proves we’re on track?
  Why: encourages evidence over activity.
  

• Which constraint is most binding right now, and how are we designing around it?
  Why: focuses creativity at the bottleneck.
  

• What are the top two risks, and what’s the next validation for each?
  Why: prioritizes mitigation over speculation.
  

• Which options did you reject, and why?
  Why: surfaces decision criteria and improves option quality.
  

• Which decisions here are hard to reverse, and what must we learn before making them?
  Why: avoids hard-to-reverse mistakes and moves quickly on easy-to-reverse decisions.
  

• What’s the smallest customer/stakeholder signal we can gather before we invest more?
  Why: grounds choices in reality, not opinions.
  

• Where do you need my help to unblock around resources, air cover, or cross-team decisions?
  Why: keeps leadership leverage where it matters.
  

I’m not proposing a complete hands-off approach. It’s about hands-on the right things: outcomes, boundaries, cadence. You trade status theater for evidence, debates for pre-approved trade-offs, and control for a system. Do that, and the work speeds up, team energy builds, and you don’t burn out.