Describe a piece of work you handed over completely — decisions included — when doing it yourself would have been faster. How did you set the person up?
Why this works
Handing over tasks is easy; handing over decisions is the real transfer, and "faster to do it myself" is precisely the moment weak delegators take work back. What was set up front — context, boundaries, check-ins — separates real ownership from both hovering and abdication.
Follow-up probes
- Which decisions were genuinely theirs, and which did you keep?
- When they hit trouble, what did you do — and deliberately not do?
- What was harder to let go of than you expected?
What good looks like
A real outcome at stake rather than busywork, the boundaries of ownership made explicit at handover, trouble met with questions instead of a takeover, and the person visibly more capable at the end than at the start.
Red flags
Delegation that was task assignment with every decision retained, a quiet takeover at the first wobble, work tossed over the wall with no context and called empowerment, or the result presented upward as the candidate's own.
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