Trust Gets You a Good Hire. It Doesn’t Get You a Repeatable Outcome.

My first year managing a team at Amazon, I made the same mistake most people make when they start delegating. I picked people I trusted and figured that was the job done. Hire well, hand things over, everything’s fine.

It wasn’t fine. Things got done, but not the way I’d have done them, and I spent half my week fixing small things that weren’t technically wrong, just not what I’d pictured. I remember sitting there frustrated, thinking these were good people, so why wasn’t this working?

It took me embarrassingly long to realise the problem wasn’t the people. It was that I’d never actually told them what I wanted. I knew what “done” looked like in my head. I’d never written it down, never said it out loud in a way that gave them anything to work from. I was delegating the task and keeping the definition of success entirely to myself, then getting annoyed when they couldn’t read my mind.

A client called me last month with almost the exact same problem. She’d handed her invoicing over to a new VA with one line: can you just sort this out. Three weeks later nothing matched, nothing reconciled, and she was back doing it herself at midnight, more exhausted than before she’d hired any help at all. When we talked it through, there was no brief, no definition of done, no sense of what the VA could decide on her own versus what needed to come back to my client first. The VA wasn’t guessing badly. She was guessing blind.

This is the part nobody tells you when they say “just delegate more.” Trust gets you a good hire. It does not get you a repeatable outcome. You can trust someone completely and still get inconsistent results, because trust isn’t a system, it’s a feeling, and feelings don’t survive a busy Tuesday when your VA has to make ten small decisions with no reference point.

What actually closes the gap is unglamorous. A short brief. What done looks like, specifically. What they’re free to decide without checking with you, and what needs to come back to you first. Where to go if something’s unclear, so you’re not the only path forward. None of this takes long to write. It takes longer to live without it, redoing work at midnight because nobody ever wrote down what “sorted out” meant.

I think about that Amazon year a lot now, building this business on my own. I don’t have a team to delegate to day to day, but I write briefs constantly anyway, for clients, for myself, for the future version of me who won’t remember why I did something a certain way. The habit stuck because it’s the difference between hoping something goes well and actually setting it up to.

Your turn: what’s the last thing you handed off with nothing more than “can you sort this,” and how did it go?