The CTO that found himself dealing with the tasks no one wanted to do

This story is about Cobalt Lemur, a CTO in need to learn how to delegate. Each of Wave’s clients is known as an alias to preserve confidentiality. Each alias is granted randomly and is a coloured animal.

Cobalt Lemur started his coaching with the goal of working on delegation. As a CTO, he was feeling he had too many things to do and he used to find himself fixing emergencies all the time and dealing with the tasks no one wanted to do. This was making him lose interest in his job but at the same time, it was hard for him to ask for help or to delegate.

Wave helped him explore his difficulty with delegating and he identified two main reasons for this. On one hand, he felt that explaining the tasks and checking afterward would take more time than doing it himself so he got used to simply resolving the problems, which led to everyone expecting that from him. He felt his added value was to solve problems the others couldn’t solve. On the other hand, he realized he had a hard time with hierarchical relationships. He didn’t feel comfortable with being the boss and delegating uninteresting tasks to others, so he was keeping them for himself at the cost of feeling more and more unmotivated on a daily basis.

One of the exercises Wave shared had a big impact on Cobalt Lemur, helping him easily identify tasks he could start to delegate from the ones he liked and wanted to keep doing himself. What was more difficult was to actually take action, but Wave pushed him to do so. He started delegating 3 tasks per week, every week. What was uncomfortable in the beginning started to become easier with time, as he realized that what was uninteresting to some was in fact interesting to others. His mindset started changing. He understood that teaching people instead of quickly giving them a solution was a long-term investment to help them grow and be more autonomous. He quickly saw how, by taking more responsibilities, his team felt more invested and gained maturity while at the same time his workload decreased. Helping others do, was definitely a win-win.

Near the end of this coaching, he felt he had gotten used to delegating and that this made him find balance. He said he realized that all tasks must be delegable as nobody is irreplaceable and one day the company would have to live without him. He understood he could count on others even when he thought he was the only one capable of doing the job.