I wrote this in July 2018 about leadership and letting go. It was about managing people. In 2025, it's about managing AI.
When you delegate, you can't go back and say it's not done how you would have done it.
You passed off responsibility. You relinquished that power. Now let that person own it.
The AI delegation problem
This is the hardest lesson in leadership and it's the exact same lesson people need to learn with AI right now. You delegate a task to an agent, then nitpick every output because "that's not how I would have done it." That's not delegation — that's micromanagement with extra steps.
True delegation means faith. Whether it's a person or a machine.
I watch people spend thirty minutes reviewing an agent's five-minute output, tweaking variable names and reformatting code that works perfectly. That's not quality control. That's an inability to let go. If you trusted a senior engineer to make those calls, trust the tool the same way. Judge the output, not the process.
The best leaders I've worked with share one trait: they define the outcome, hand off the execution, and accept the result if it meets the bar. They don't care how it got done. That's delegation. Everything else is theatre.