I know this is going to shock you, but things don’t always go as planned.

Especially when delegating to a team member.

It is super tempting to decide no one can do it as well as you, and take the work back.

That way lies burnout.

So, since what we want is to pass responsibility for the outcome to our team, we’ve got to make a different choice.

After breathing through the emotions, it is time to get curious.

Here’s a kicker, it is possible that they did everything right and still had a bad outcome.

Start the conversation with clarifying intent.

Because people are used to having blame conversations when things go wrong, not actual useful dialog.

That can sound like, “You probably think I’m going to get on your case.”

After that, you can tell them what you really want, “I want to go through what happened, so we can both learn from this and know what to do next time.”

“In this situation, what did we WANT to have happen?”

Make sure you agree about that, first.

Then you can look at, “So what happened first?”

“Then what happened?”

“What did you think when that happened?”

(Careful with tone here, info gathering, not blaming)

“How did you decide what to do?”

“What should be done differently to get the outcome we want?”

Hand over responsibility for summarizing to them.

This kind of conversation is rare.

If you want to practice, reach out.