Companion Worksheet
The printable companion to the delegation essay. Four pages: the four terms, the six-beat handoff script, the ownership dial, and the five-minute rep for after. Fill it in here, or print it and keep it beside you.
The Handoff Field Card.
Delegation is a downbeat, not a dump. You set the tempo. The music comes from their hands.
Take away any term and you get a recognizable failure.
The outcome is theirs and the authority travels with it. The test: when it ships, could you honestly say the decisions were theirs?
What done looks like, as an outcome. Every real constraint, and only the real ones. And the piece almost everyone skips: which decisions are already made, which are theirs alone, which you make together.
Cover. Notes from upstairs come to you; the pen stays with them.
A named checkpoint. Credit that lands on them publicly. Feedback close to the moment.
Delegation is a downbeat, not a dump.
Script it before you say it. Six beats:
Start to finish, their name on it.
The outcome, not the steps.
Count them. Two is a good number.
Say it, and mean it.
“If anyone has notes, they come to me. The pen stays with you.”
A date, and one question: “What do you need from me between now and then?”
Script it before you say it. Six beats.
Ownership is a dial, not a switch. Marquet’s ladder of language:
Two questions for every handoff: where is this person, on this work, at these stakes?
And what would move them one setting higher by next quarter?
One rung at a time. Never flip the switch.
The owner does most of the talking. Your sentences mostly end in question marks.
“What are you seeing that I can’t?”
“What do you need from me right now?”
The problem stays on their back. In the hallway, one answer only: “Bring it to the check-in.”
The draft comes back at 70% and the deadline is Thursday.
Feel the pull. Name the word driving it: faster, better, smoother, easier. Then leave the work in their hands one beat longer than feels safe.Rewriting it teaches exactly one lesson: their decisions don’t count.
One rung at a time. Never flip the switch.
Two questions, in writing, while it’s fresh.
1Where did the itch show up?
The urge to grab the pen, the hallway solve, the 1am rewrite.
2What did I notice right before it?
The signal to catch next time.
You already know what the music is supposed to sound like. The hard part is where it has to come from now. Not your hands, theirs.
You set the tempo. The music comes from their hands.
becomes skill.