Your team brings you work that’s almost finished.
You fix it because you’re faster. You get frustrated because you thought you’d already explained it. And three weeks later, you’re fixing something else you thought was understood.
It’s easy to look at that pattern and conclude that your team is underperforming.
But what if they’re not?
What if they’re guessing?
There’s a whole industry built on telling you that underperformance is a people problem. That if everyone understood their own motivational drivers, and you had a precise map of each team member, the underperformance would resolve itself.
I disagree.
Sometimes you have a people problem. But before you decide that someone isn’t capable of doing the job, you need to look at what you’ve actually given them to work with.
What Goldman Sachs taught me about expectations
Let me tell you about my first real job.
I was 22, working at Goldman Sachs, one of a whole intake of new hires who’d just walked out of Ivy League schools and into the most prestigious firm on Wall Street.
One of my senior colleagues, a guy we called Trip, said something about one of the other bright-eyed, bushy-tailed new hires in our department:
“He needs to be hit over the head with a baseball bat so he understands his place.”
I know, harsh.
Obviously nobody was swinging anything at anybody. We were just lobbing paper balls into the trash cans for fun. But it was Trip’s way of saying somebody needs to tell this kid (and I imagine me too) where he stands.
Trip could say that because he’d paid his dues at Goldman and knew what was expected. And it was pretty clear that a 22-year-old newbie was far from that.
The point isn’t that Goldman had perfect systems. It’s that there was a standard. The experienced people knew what it was. The new hires had to learn it.
Now look at your business.
Does your team know what’s expected of them? Do they know what good work looks like? Do they know what “finished” means?
Or does the answer depend on what’s in your head?
When the founder is the system
You know how you want things done. You know which details matter, which ones don’t, and when something is good enough to go out the door.
But knowing it yourself isn’t the same as making it clear to someone else.
You ask a team member to prepare something for a client. They do the work and bring it back to you. You look at it and immediately see what’s missing.
The numbers aren’t quite right. The formatting needs fixing. They haven’t checked something you would have checked. Or they’ve made a decision you would have made differently.
So you fix it.
Because explaining it will take longer than doing it yourself.
And because you’re faster than everyone else, that probably feels like the sensible thing to do.
But now the work is finished, and the team member still doesn’t know what you did to finish it.
Next time, they make another reasonable guess. You correct it again. And the cycle continues.
The problem isn’t necessarily that they don’t care or aren’t trying hard enough.
They may not know the standard you’re holding them to.
And if the standard only exists in your head, you’re the only person who can reliably meet it.
You can’t hold people accountable to standards you never defined
This is where SOPs matter. But not because every task needs a 47-step instruction manual.
Your team needs to know what the system is, when the order matters, and when it doesn’t.
Think about baking. Sometimes adding the dry ingredients before the wet ones makes a difference. Sometimes it doesn’t. If you know the recipe, you know which steps matter and where you have room to improvise.
Your team needs that same understanding.
If there’s a process that must be followed, write it down. If there’s a standard the finished work must meet, make it explicit. If there’s room for judgment, tell them where that room is.
Otherwise, you’re asking people to follow rules they don’t know exist.
And then getting frustrated when they break them.
What “finished” actually looks like
Imagine you ask someone on your team to prepare a client proposal.
You know what a good proposal looks like. You know which information needs to be included, how you want the pricing presented, and what needs to be checked before it goes out.
But you haven’t written any of that down.
So your team member prepares the proposal and brings it to you.
You look at it and say, “This is good, but we need to change the pricing. And did you check whether we have the capacity to deliver this? Also, I wouldn’t promise that timeline.”
Now you’re rewriting the proposal.
The next time, you could explain the same things again. Or you could define what a finished proposal needs to include.
For example: the scope is clear, the pricing follows your current pricing structure, the delivery timeline has been checked, and the proposal is ready to send without you having to rewrite it.
Now your team member has something to work toward.
They can check their own work before bringing it to you. They can see what’s missing. And if they’re unsure about something, they can ask a specific question instead of handing you the whole thing to figure out.
That doesn’t mean you’ll never need to review a proposal again. It means you’re no longer the only person who knows what a good one looks like.
And that’s a very different way to run a business.
How to delegate without everything coming back to you
Delegation in business management isn’t simply handing someone a task and hoping they do it the way you would.
It means giving them enough information, authority, and responsibility to complete the work without you having to take it back.
Define what finished looks like. Don’t assume that “prepare the report” or “handle the client” means the same thing to everyone. What needs to be included? What needs to be checked? What does the final result need to accomplish? Make the standard clear enough that someone can look at their own work and know whether it’s ready.
Get what’s in your head onto paper, especially when the HOW matters. You don’t need to document every tiny action. But if a process has to happen in a particular order, or there are important steps people keep missing, write them down. If only you know how to do it, you’ll forever be the reason you’re overworking and your revenue is capped.
Hand over decisions to your team. At this level, not everything needs your personal OK. Decide which decisions your team can make, which ones need to come to you, and what information they need to make a good call. Otherwise, even capable people will keep bringing decisions back to your desk.
Make responsibility and measurement clear. Let people know what they’re responsible for, what you’re measuring, and what happens when it’s done well. And when it isn’t. Accountability becomes much more useful when everyone knows what they’re accountable for.
None of this means you stop coaching your team. It means you give them something concrete to work toward.
Your business can’t grow beyond your personal capacity if everything comes back to you
When you’re the person who knows the standard, makes the decisions, checks the work, and finishes what everyone else started, your business is still depending on you to make everything happen.
You can hire more people. You can bring in more clients. You can increase revenue.
But if every additional person creates more work for you to explain, check, and correct, you haven’t really solved the problem.
You’ve just made yourself busier.
The goal isn’t to become better at explaining the same thing over and over again. It’s to build a business where capable people know what’s expected, have the systems they need, and can make decisions without everything landing on your desk.
That’s how you grow a 7-figure business without giving more of your life to it.
And before you spend money on another report about motivational drivers, make sure your team actually knows what you want them to do.
Because you can’t hold someone accountable to systems and standards you never defined.
And thinking a personality report will fix that is like hitting yourself over the head with a baseball bat and expecting your team to say ouch.
Ready to get your business out of your head?
If your team keeps bringing decisions and unfinished work back to you, let’s look at what’s keeping you in the middle of everything.
Book a free 30-minute mini consult, and we’ll talk about what’s happening in your business and where you may need to make a change.
