The primary reason people fail to delegate is the correct belief that they can do a task faster and better themselves the first time. The key is to accept this initial time cost as a necessary investment in long-term leverage and compounding efficiency, rather than a reason to avoid delegating.

Exceptional people in flawed systems will produce subpar results. Before focusing on individual performance, leaders must ensure the underlying systems are reliable and resilient. As shown by the Southwest Airlines software meltdown, blaming employees for systemic failures masks the root cause and prevents meaningful improvement.

The transition to managing managers requires a fundamental identity shift from individual contributor to enabler. A leader's value is no longer in their personal output. They must ask, "Is it more important that I do the work, or that the work gets done?" This question forces a necessary focus on delegation, empowerment, and system-building.

Focusing on "bad to great" is more effective than "good to great" when scaling. Bad behaviors and destructive norms are so corrosive that they make it impossible for excellence to take root. A leader's first job in a turnaround or scaling effort is to eliminate the bad—like dirty bathrooms or incompetent employees—before trying to implement the good.

It is almost always faster and better to do a task yourself once. However, this is a trap. The "cardinal sin" is failing to invest the extra upfront effort to delegate and train someone, which unlocks compounded time savings and prevents you from ever having to do that task again.

The belief that people fail due to lack of will leads to blame. Shifting to 'people do well if they can' reframes failure as a skill gap, not a will gap. This moves your role from enforcer to helper, focusing you on identifying and building missing skills.

Instead of over-analyzing and philosophizing about process improvements, simply force the team to increase its cadence and ship faster. This discomfort forces quicker, more natural problem-solving, causing many underlying inefficiencies to self-correct without needing a formal change initiative.

Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.

Managers cannot just be soldiers executing orders. If you don't truly believe in a strategy, you cannot effectively inspire your team. You must engage leadership to find an angle you can genuinely support or decompose the idea into testable hypotheses you can commit to.