The most expensive habit in leadership

Hi friends

I haven’t written in almost a month.

And before I say anything else, I’m admitting this first, because the reason I stopped is the same reason I’m writing this letter today.

I got too busy doing things I should have let go of.

We’re back in London, in the middle of it all. And if you’ve lived between Africa and Europe, you know what that switch actually feels like in the body. In Accra, life shares itself with you. Family close by, hands that show up without being asked, a whole village running in the background of your days. In London, it is just us. Aba and I, holding everything that in Ghana gets distributed between many. And I won’t pretend it hasn’t been a lot. But I’ll also tell you the strange thing that has happened: our family has gotten closer. The weight has drawn us together in ways the ease didn’t. So I’m not complaining. I’m just being honest about where I’m writing from, and what this season has been showing me about myself.

Because what London stripped away, very fast, was the illusion that I could keep doing everything. Especially with work.

And that confronts me with something pretty uncomfortable:

How much of my identity is STILL tied to being the one who handles it.

I think a lot of us carry this. The need to be useful. The instinct to solve. The satisfaction of being the person others can depend on. It doesn’t feel like a problem because from the outside it looks like strength. Or a great work ethic. Or dedication. Some call it great leadership.

I get it. But what if it’s none of those things. What if it’s just control … wearing great makeup.

You don’t see that the cost of that control is not just your time or your energy, though it takes both. The real cost is everything that doesn’t get built while you are busy being indispensable. The ideas you never had because your hands were too full to think. The people around you who never got to grow because you kept stepping in before they could find their footing. The version of your work that could have been bigger, faster, better, if only you had been willing to trust someone else with a piece of it.

That is what I have been grappling with this month. Delegation. Not as a productivity tool… just as the thing I resist when I am operating from fear rather than faith.

There is a book that changed the way I think about this problem. It cracked something open for me when I first read it. Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy wrote Who Not How, and the central idea is deceptively simple. When something needs to get done, most of us ask immediately: how do I do this? Pretty obvious way to go about it, right? The book indicates there is better question: WHO is the right person to deliver this? And am I willing to let them?

A meaningful shift.

Embedded in the “how” question is the assumption that YOU are the answer. And embedded in the “who” question is an act of humility that most high-achieving people wrestle with. Because they have spent years building the competence to solve things themselves, and trusting someone else with something that matters feels, if we’re being honest, like losing a little bit of ground.

I know that feeling. I have felt it this past month. There, I admit it again.

Well, here is what I have come to believe, and what I want to leave with you today.

When you hold on to work that someone else could carry, you are not protecting the work. You are protecting your sense of being needed or being important. And those are very different things.

Effective delegation, real delegation, requires you to be ultra clear about what you need, limits your focus to finding the right person and throws you into the work of giving them everything they require to succeed. Then, it asks you to genuinely get out of the way… Yup, such an act of faith… in the people around you.

Delegation does something for the other person that we often underestimate too. When you trust someone with something that matters, you are telling them something about who you think they are. Some of the most significant moments in my own life have been when someone handed me something important before I felt ready for it, and then stepped back and let me rise to meet it. It’s beyond a work thing. That is one of the most generous things a leader can do for another person.

And beyond you, beyond them, the organisations and movements that outlast their founders share THAT thing in common. The work is never held by one pair of hands. It is trusted outward, woven into other people, until it no longer needed its origin to survive. That’s where legacies are born. All beginning from a leader with the willingness to loosen their grip.

I am writing this from London on a week where so much is asking for my attention at once. And I am choosing to write it anyway, obviously not from a place of mastery. I am still in the middle of learning it.

This letter is me holding myself accountable to actually let go.

We were not built to do everything. We were built to lead. And the sooner you live like you believe that, the sooner the people around you get to become who they were built to be.

That’s something we learn so clearly from our Lord, Jesus Christ. The beginning of discipling others.

Until next time.

Sydney

P.S. Don’t keep your thoughts to your self. If this resonated in anyway, comment or send me an email hello@sydneysam.com. It means the world to hear from you!