How to fix it when delegating fails - 5 min feedback script

Host Lia Garvin breaks down exactly what to do in the first five minutes after delegated work comes back wrong. Learn why taking work back stalls team growth, a practical 5‑minute feedback script to correct the task without micromanaging, and clear steps to restore accountability and prevent repeat mistakes — phrasing you can use immediately.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why taking work back without feedback keeps your team stuck -- and you stuck in the weeds
• The question to ask yourself before you give corrective feedback
• What it sounds like to name the gap specifically without making it personal
• How to turn a bad first delivery into a real learning moment
• Why the goal isn't "done my way" -- and how that reframe changes everything

Resources mentioned:

• Free guide - exact scripts for how to have 5 tricky conversations with your team: liagarvin.com/convo
• DM "convo" on Instagram to receive the guide

Download my FREE guide to making hard conversations with your team easier at liagarvin.com/convo

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© 2026 Lia Garvin / Managing Made Simple

Transcript

Lia (00:00)
How in the world is this what my team member thought I wanted? That is the thought that runs through your mind when you delegated something, you finally did it, you finally handed something off, and it comes back, not exactly how you imagined it. Why did I do this? I knew I shouldn't have handed it off. I knew it would take longer. Now I'm stuck. Now I've got to give some feedback. Now I have to be micromanaging. And you spiral and spiral and spiral. How do I know? Because that is what happens to me.

Every time I hand something off. It well, it was, it was the case until I learned what we are going to talk about today on the show, which is what to do when you hand something off and you see the end product and it's not quite right. But fear not, my friends, because this simple shift is going to make it so much easier. And it's going to prevent you from taking that work back and never delegating again.

Let's just call it. It is so frustrating when you've done what we talked about last week, which is talk through all the non-negotiables, really make sure the person knows kind of the look and feel. You you actually checked in along the way and you felt like you gave some good feedback. And then they're like ta-da. And you think to yourself, my God, are are we living on different planets? What freaking happen? I get it. And again, like that urge to just be like, never mind, just like go away.

It's it's freaking real. Okay. But when we just stop there and take that thing back and don't delegate anymore, and we're like, never mind, I learned my lesson. What are we doing? Well, we are never gonna get out of the weeds. We're never gonna teach our team member how to do the thing, whatever we needed them to take on. We're gonna be stuck in that dispatching, right? Just plain fetch with tasks. And the truth is your team members are never gonna step up.

To do more, if any time there was like an opportunity for feedback, you're just like, nah, never mind, I'll just do it. And I know that it's when you're frustrated and you feel like this was pretty obvious. And I don't like how did you miss it? I know that that can feel like I I don't want to take the time and and talk through this. Like we're whatever. Just just just no, just go away. I hear you. But is that really the goal?

Let's be honest. It's not the goal. It's not the goal to, you know, like have a team member that doesn't really know why they didn't do something right. And they're kind of like just picking up work here and there or and they never can really get something over the finish line. Of course that's not the goal. And that's why as leaders, we we gotta think to ourselves, okay, like I gotta just like suck it up and take the five minutes to reset. Because that is all it takes.

It only takes a few minutes to say, well, okay. We talked about this, and here's what I'm seeing. Let's figure out what to do. This is the conversation. This is where actually each of the steps, right? We said what figure out what to delegate. Now we said how to set the non-negotiables, those standards. Today is like how to really make sure this sort of system is running itself. All of these steps are important. This one today is how you make it repeatable.

How you teach someone how to fish, right? How you get out of that feeling of like, gosh, I hired the wrong people. no one, no one can do what I'm asking them to do. Is it me? Is it them? All the second guessing. So let's picture it. You've handed off a client presentation, right? The person's putting together research and kind of data. They're looking across maybe,

What the client, like, let's say you run a marketing business, right? And you're putting together a a strategy deck for a client that you're gonna use both to pitch and kind of identify the first couple ideas. You ask your team member to run with this. So they're doing research on the competitive landscape into that client. They're putting together some ideas and it's pretty straightforward. It's a test that's been done before. You feel like it's pretty spelled out. So you want this person to run with it and you're you're hoping that after they do a good job at this, they can actually own.

The like driving, putting together these strategy decks going forward. So, and hey, if you if you are running, you know, a software team, whatever, think about it as an OKRs deck or a quarterly planning, whatever. You can you can imagine this. So we've got our marketing deck or strategy. And you checked in along the way, they're using the right template, they understand the inputs, though those are the non-negotiables. And then it's a day before the client pitch and you're reviewing it one last time. And you look at it.

And you feel like the research is kind of half baked. The in the the ideas for the strategy is like, why would we suggest that? It doesn't even make sense. And you're reading the deck and you're like, this is not compelling. If I was the client, I would not go with this marketing agency. I don't feel like this deck is good. And you're really deflated because you did everything that you could along the way. You you identified a really meaningful project. Again, you set the non-negotiables, you talked through.

You reviewed it. And when it came back to you at the 11th hour, it's not good. This is that gut punch. Again, I've been there too. That when you feel it, you've gotta resist the urge to say, okay, okay, forget it. I'm I'm nope, I'm gonna take this over. And instead say, take a deep breath and say, okay, well, how can I be more clear? What feedback can I give?

And what can I say so that this person can understand both what the gaps were and how to close them. Okay. So with this deck, for example, we want to be clear on what's missing, what didn't hit the mark, what are the gaps that you see in the strategy, what would have been the expectation that you'd see with the research, right? You're starting to identify what actually wasn't right because you cannot lead through an I know it when I'll see it sort of mentality.

That's not a way someone can ever take something on. But right now, when you see this this output that's not good, not to your standard, it is your turn, it is your kind of like obligation as a as a leader to explain well what wasn't up to standard and and why, what was missed. Not why didn't you research better, right? We're not accusing, we're thinking first for ourselves. Okay, well, what would I would have wanted to have seen? Because you know what.

Hey, maybe when you explain, like, you know, hey, a good strategy deck includes this, this, and this, there was just, you know, you didn't anticipate these issues coming up. Okay, maybe you did define success up front. But now that you're seeing it, you see there's an opportunity to be even more clear. And that is the shift we've got to make. We cannot get stuck in, they should have done this. Why didn't they this? Why didn't they that? How is this what they came up with? The spiral of being mad, even when we're mad.

And this is real hard for me. I get it. Cause I have a really high standard. I'm very detail oriented. And I'm like, if someone explains it to me, like I'm gonna get it exactly right. And so when I have someone deliver something to me that's not, I think how I would have done it right. Why why can't they get it? I get it. And everybody's different, right? Every they're they're kind of figuring it out, and we've gotta give people a little bit of grace. Okay. So this was a really big lesson for me to learn.

And as I learned it and got better at that and had some missteps and said, well, gosh, like, first of all, everybody thinks in different ways, right? That's just like the reality of it. And second, the if I haven't said what I wanted, I cannot expect someone to read my mind. And if I don't really know what I want until I see it, then there has to be a conversation about how do we continue to make something better, right?

So again, whether this was a marketing deck for you as you're imagining what this looks like in your team, in OKR's presentation, a strategy planning meeting, whatever it is, when you see something and it is not what you wanted, you've got to think first. Ask yourself, what would I have wanted? What is missing? What are the gaps here? If you see that deck and you tell someone, this isn't, this isn't hitting the mark, go fix it. This isn't there yet, go fix it.

I had a boss about 15 years ago that would say to me, I'd send him a deck. I was working as chief of staff at Bank of America, working on like the back office technology, like kind of like deep, deep into the into the depths of the bank on the tech side. And I had the managing director that I worked for. I made all of the presentations, all the staff, kind of like resource planning, all the budgeting. And I would send him a deck and he would just write nearly there. And he was just right.

Nearly there, he's British. And he like, and I knew, okay, I gotta keep riffing on it. But he gave me no more information than those two words nearly there, nearly there, nearly there. And I had to guess. And I had to make iteration after iteration and spent hours and hours and hours and hours guessing what he wanted. Guys, I'm gonna tell you, that's not a good use of your t team members' time. Sorry, like wasn't a good use of my time.

I would just keep trying and trying and trying. And then he'd be like, You got it. And what's so funny about that story is years later, you know, we stayed in touch. He was one of my favorite bosses. we, you know, we met up when I was local in New York where he's at now. And he said, You were the only employee I've ever had that could totally read my mind. And I thought to myself, really? Because I felt like it took a lot of iterations on that. But

He felt like we actually were in sync because when he'd say nearly there, it would get better and better and better. And I started to be able to tell again what he wanted. But listen, like what a what an inefficient way to getting there. He could have just said, okay, slide five has this issue. This this I want to have shaped differently and and whatever. He could have been a little bit more clear. That would have saved me hours of time. And him knowing that boom, I can get that right on the on the first try.

Right. If you're really clear. So if you are in a nearly there, nearly there cycle, I gotta tell you, your team members, they don't really know what to do. They're just f hoping they stumble into the right thing. And then if they do that sooner, it might seem to you like they've kind of gotten it, but it's probably like they're guessing and spending a lot of time and energy on something that you could shortcut immediately by being more clear about what's missing.

So what do you say? Well, you think to yourself first, like we said, okay, what what am I not seeing? What would I would have wanted? And, you know, why is this thing missing? And you're asking yourself that. And then you sit down with that person. And let's say there's no time and you have to do this thing yourself. You sit down with that person, you say, Hey, you know, looking at the deck, these things are really working. These are the gaps that are missing, because the presentation is tomorrow morning.

I'm going to take this on. Here are the changes I'm going to make and why. Or if it's running a meeting, I'm going to facilitate it in this way. Please shadow me and let's talk through what I did. If you have to take it over, I'm acknowledging sometimes you do. Make sure that's still a learning opportunity for that person so that they can take away something and run with it next time. But ideally, you can give that person another try to get this thing right up to your standard, to get it really completed.

And so saying, hey, here's the gaps I've identified. Here's some of the things I was was expecting to see. And then it's an open conversation. Is that clear? What do you think you're going to try next? What do you think? And you have an open conversation and you start to see, and they go, okay, yes, I didn't realize that. Or wait a second, what do you mean? And you have a dialogue. Now that you have a like objective sort of like thing to look at, which is the output, which is the work, you can say, hey,

Let's look at this kind of down the line and talk through how we get this to the what I was expecting. Now, your checklist in your mind has to be, am I wanting it different because it's the way I would have done it? Versus is this getting the job done? And that's going to be the hardest question to ask ourselves with every single task we delegate, with every single thing we see one of our team members do. We don't want people to do everything our way. We want them to do it a good way.

A great way, a way that makes our customers and our clients and and our whatever partners and stakeholders happy. We want them to do a good job. It doesn't have to be our way. And actually, a listener wrote in on last week about the non-negotiables. And she said, Well, is this, you know, don't we want to leave folks some space to to you know put their own spin on it? And the answer is absolutely.

But that's not at the expense of being clear and defining what was supposed to be in there in the first place. Right. So it's not an either-or. The non-negotiables that we talked about last week are about like this is the criteria that this work output has to include. That should still contain a lot of space for someone to add their own spin to it. Now, same thing here. When you're giving that corrective feedback and you're saying, okay, here, you know, this is what I need to see and this is why.

Right. And giving them an opportunity to talk through it, you're not saying this is what I would have said because that's the way I want to say it, right? It has to have a real why connected to how that makes a better result. And that's the way your team member will understand it. And that's the only way that they're going to be able to make it their own. Because if they know why, that leaves a whole o open space to say, okay, well, with this goal, here's how I'd approach that. If the goal is

Read my mind, do it exactly how I want. There's there is no flexibility there. So that is how you get from the situation of saying, my gosh, this is what they came up with. I can't believe it. I'm never gonna delegate again. Forget it. This was a waste of time. Or I can't believe I hired this person. What is this? Okay, like I know I've I know what you're thinking. I've thought of myself. That's how you go from that to okay, we've got a real opportunity.

To give some clear feedback, hear what they're understanding, make a plan, and get that thing over the finish line so that next time when you hand that off, they can do that exactly how you were envisioning it from the beginning. It's how you shift from the nearly there millions of iterations, hoping they finally guess, to hey, it goes from like

the the task identification or whatever work identification to talking through those non-negotiables to hey this thing needs a little tweak here and here and then boom we're done. This is the conversation if you're avoiding this, if you're not having that last conversation because you just feel like, well, whatever. I it's i it's not worth it. You're missing it. It's so worth it. Okay. And I actually put together this new guide, five conversations that we're avoiding, just like the one here.

A a free guide to tell you exactly what to say. I think sometimes we don't want to give the feedback because we're like, well, I don't want to make it a whole thing. And so literally, this free guide gives you scripts, what to say word for word, so you get that conversation going and when. Huge one is giving the feedback when you don't see work at the quality that you wanted. Right. So we talk about this exact conversation. Another one is how to, you know, really keep keep your high performers happy and feeling recognized, right? That's another one that conversation we maybe didn't even know we needed.

So grab that free guide at LeahGarvin.com/slash convo or on Instagram DM me the word convo and I'll get you on that list for the free guide. These are not situations that we need to avoid. These are ones that with a simple conversation, a simple shift, it's gonna get so much easier. So try what we talked about today, grab the free guide. Again, Instagram DM me the word convo or head to LeahGarvin.com slash convo. Get the guide, practice this and

This is the kind of full circle on this conversation around delegating. We figure out what we want to do, we set those non negotiables, and then we have a conversation in a very productive and clear way when something isn't quite there so that team member can nail it. All right. See you next time.