Delegation Is Not Dumping

Stephanie handed the vendor renegotiation to her newest manager Friday afternoon with a one-line email: “This is yours now — good luck.” By Tuesday morning, the manager still hadn’t opened the file, and it wasn’t laziness. He had no idea what authority he actually had, what had already been tried with this vendor, or whether Stephanie would back him if the negotiation went sideways. What Stephanie called delegation, her manager quietly experienced as being left to guess.

CHEW with Me

New here? What is CHEW? — a 30-second practice that grows into a day woven with God’s love.

C: Clarity — Delegation and Dumping Can Look Identical

Real delegation and simply dumping a task both look the same from the outside — a leader hands something to someone else and stops thinking about it. The difference only shows up in what came before the handoff: instruction, context, and a leader who’s still present, even at a distance, when the thing gets hard.

H: Hear — Sent in Pairs, Into Ground He Was Already Walking Toward

“After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go.” (Luke 10:1)

Jesus doesn’t scatter seventy-two people into the countryside with a vague blessing and a wave. He sends them in pairs — nobody works this alone — into towns He was already planning to reach Himself. The verses that follow (Luke 10:2–12) give them specific, practical instructions: what to carry, what to say entering a house, how to respond to welcome and how to respond to rejection. This is commissioning with real content behind it, not a task lobbed over a wall.

“Ahead of him” carries real weight here too. The seventy-two aren’t sent instead of Jesus showing up — they’re sent into ground He was already walking toward Himself, which means their labor connects to His presence rather than substituting for it. Compare that to Numbers 11:16–17, where God tells Moses to gather seventy elders so the Spirit resting on Moses would rest on them too — delegation there explicitly shares the source of the authority, not just the workload. Neither passage describes a leader who hands something off and checks out.

Because God’s love sends you equipped rather than merely dispatched, how does that change what you hand your team member today?

E: Exchange — Trade Dispatching for Equipping

Trade “I delegated it, so it’s off my plate” for “I sent them equipped into ground I’m still walking toward with them.” The task can leave your desk without your presence leaving the process.

W: Walk — Add the Context, Authority, or Information to Your Delegation

Name the next task you’re about to delegate. Write down the one piece of context, authority, or “here’s what’s already been tried” information you were about to leave out — and include it before you hit send.

Closing question: What did you dump this year that you’ve been quietly calling delegation?