Just over ten years ago, I fixed my gaze firmly on leadership. Armed with little more than confidence, enthusiasm, and a spectacular lack of experience, I was convinced that leadership was leadership, regardless of scale or setting. The logic felt sound at the time: if you could lead a classroom, manage behaviour, motivate thirty young people and keep learning moving forward, then leading a team of adults would surely follow the same principles. Same skills. Same approach. Just bigger chairs and better coffee.

As it turns out, I was only partially right – and spectacularly naïve in all the ways that mattered.

If you told me that possibly the hardest part of being a middle leader, whether that be a Second in Department or Whole-School Area Lead, would be learning how to delegate, I’d have laughed. What could possibly be so difficult about giving someone a task? You explain what needs doing, hand it over, and they do it. Simple.

But the reality, for the quintessential perfectionist-monkey-carrier – the sort of leader who not only took on extra tasks but willingly strapped someone else’s too onto my back – delegation wasn’t about distributing work. It was about relinquishing control. And somewhere along the way, I realised I hadn’t just taken on too much. I had taken on responsibility that was never mine to carry, and I’d bitten off far more than I could proverbially chew.

Delegation is not something I can say I ever successfully mastered; it was something I came to understand slowly, and not without resistance. I once believed that handing a task over marked the end of my responsibility. In reality, it was only the beginning. The beginning of letting go, of creating the conditions for others to grow, to learn, and to make mistakes safely. It marked the shift from execution to enablement. For me, this is the mark of effective delegation.

Let’s Talk Monkeys

There is a well known leadership metaphor around “monkeys”, first introduced by William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass in their 1970s work on Monkey Management for the Harvard Business Review. In simple terms, every task, problem, or decision is a monkey. And the rule is equally simple: if you take the monkey, you are responsible for feeding it. Unless you have explicitly agreed to do so, it was never meant to be yours in the first place.

To be frank, when a line manager first introduced me to Monkey Management, I briefly questioned whether I should be offended that someone I respected appeared to be referring to me as a monkey. I will admit it took more than a moment for me to realise that this was, in fact, a leadership metaphor and not an especially creative insult.

I digress…

Middle leadership was where I learned, often the hard way, just how many monkeys I was carrying that were never mine to begin with. They belonged to someone else. I simply did not yet have the confidence, clarity, or courage to hand them back.

When a colleague came to me with “just a small thing”, I took it on without hesitation. I told myself I was being supportive. Approachable. Helpful. What I was actually doing was quietly absorbing responsibility that should never have left their desk. And once the monkey was on my back, it stayed there. When that small thing grew arms, teeth, and a complicated timeline, it came straight back to me.

Before long, I had become the bottleneck. The point of return. The person everything funnelled through. My to do list grew heavier, my stress levels rose accordingly, and all the while I was reinforcing a system where ownership blurred and dependency quietly thrived.

Monkey Management did not teach me how to give work away. It taught me how to recognise when I had taken responsibility that was never mine to carry, and how to resist the urge to pick it up again simply because it felt uncomfortable to leave it where it belonged.

Give Me Just One Minute

Not long after being introduced to Monkey Management, I found myself delving into The One Minute Manager. On the surface, it presents itself as deceptively simple. One minute goals. One minute praising. One minute redirecting. Neat. Tidy. Almost offensively efficient. And, if I am honest, not something I initially believed could coexist with the messy reality of school leadership.

But what struck me, particularly through the lens of delegation, was not the structure, but the intent. The One Minute Manager is not about rushing people or reducing leadership to soundbites. It is about clarity. About knowing what success looks like. About intervening briefly and purposefully, rather than hovering indefinitely.

For someone prone to carrying other people’s monkeys, this was uncomfortable reading. The idea that you could set a clear goal, step back, and trust the process felt counterintuitive. Yet, buried within its simplicity was a challenge to my default mode of leadership. If expectations are clear and feedback is timely, there is far less need to micromanage. Less justification for hovering. Less temptation to reclaim the monkey “just in case”.

What The One Minute Manager reinforced for me was that effective delegation does not require constant presence. It requires intentional moments. Moments of clarity at the start. Moments of affirmation when things are going well. Moments of correction when they are not. And then the discipline to step away again.

In that sense, it quietly complements Monkey Management. One teaches you not to take the monkey. The other teaches you how to support the person feeding it without standing over them, clipboard in hand.

Together, they forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: much of what I framed as being supportive was, in reality, a reluctance to let go.

Learning That Delegation is Not Abdication

What I came to understand, slowly and often against instinct, is that delegation is not about handing work over and stepping away entirely. It is about ownership. Not just assigning tasks, but giving people the space and permission to carry them through to completion. It is not a casual handover, a passing comment, or a vague “let me know how it goes”. It is a deliberate act of leadership that signals trust and expectation in equal measure.

It also requires clarity. Clear outcomes. Clear parameters. Clear understanding of what success looks like. Without that, delegation becomes fragile, easily undone at the first sign of uncertainty. And for someone accustomed to carrying monkeys, the temptation to take one back the moment things wobble is strong. Resisting that urge is part of the work. Staying present without stepping back into execution is harder than it sounds.

Then there is trust. The most uncomfortable part for any perfectionist. Letting go means accepting that things may be done differently, not incorrectly, but differently. And that difference is where growth happens. When you loosen your grip, even slightly, you make room for others to develop confidence, capability, and ownership of their work.

Delegation does not mean washing your hands of responsibility. It means enabling others to succeed while preserving your own capacity for the leadership work only you can do. The work that requires perspective, judgement, and direction rather than constant intervention. That distinction took me far longer to learn than I care to admit.

It took time to recognise that this resistance was not a failure of leadership, but a reflection of how my brain processed risk, responsibility, and control.

What I Was Carrying Without Realising

Unbeknownst to pre-2023 me, delegation was always going to be a particular sticking point. Not because I doubted the capability of others, but because it felt risky. My ever-protective brain was trying to avoid chaos. When I handed something over, I lost the visibility and predictability that my ADHD brain relied on to feel safe. The uncertainty was deeply uncomfortable, even if I could not articulate why at the time.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD in January 2023 (cue a collective sigh of relief from just about everyone else), I became curious rather than critical. I wanted to understand how my brain actually worked, not just where it tripped me up. What I discovered reframed my entire relationship with delegation.

ADHD impacts executive functioning: planning, prioritising, sequencing, time awareness, and working memory. When I completed a task myself, I knew exactly how it would be done, when it would be finished, and how much mental energy it would cost me. When I handed that task to someone else, all of that certainty disappeared. My brain lost sight of the process, not just the outcome. That loss of predictability created anxiety, and the quickest way to reduce it was to keep control. Delegation felt risky, not because I mistrusted people, but because my brain was trying to protect itself from cognitive overload.

Layered on top of this was a pattern of hyper-responsibility, something that many adults with ADHD develop over time. Years of being labelled forgetful, disorganised, or unreliable often lead to overcompensation in adulthood. Fearful of these labels, I overcompensated from a young age, unaware of why I was ‘different’. When it came to the workplace, I would take more on so nothing was missed. I would do it myself so it was definitely right. I would hold everything in my head so the whole system did not fall apart. Over time, this stopped being about individual tasks and became about carrying the entire operation. From the outside it can look like control. From the inside, it feels like survival.

Perfectionism also played its part. Not because ADHD brains are naturally perfectionistic, but because perfectionism becomes a coping strategy. If something is perfect, it cannot be criticised. If it is flawless, it cannot be questioned. If it is finished to my standard, it will not come back undone or incomplete. Delegation threatens that sense of safety by introducing variables I cannot fully manage, and for a brain already working hard to regulate itself, that can feel overwhelming.

There was also the issue of partial completion. ADHD brains often struggle with things that are “in progress” (much like this post, that has taken more years to write than I dare to admit). An unfinished task sits loudly in the mind, demanding attention and creating mental noise. When you delegate, the task is technically ongoing, but you cannot actively move it forward yourself. That limbo is cognitively irritating. So the temptation to pull the task back, to “just do it quickly”, is often less about efficiency and more about silencing the mental static.

Finally, there is emotional regulation. ADHD can heighten emotional responses to perceived risk. The discomfort of someone doing something differently, the possibility of mistakes, or the fear of having to fix it later can feel disproportionately intense. Control, in that context, becomes a way of regulating emotion rather than asserting authority.

Understanding this did not magically make delegation easy. But it did make it make sense. And that changed everything.

For the Other Middle Leaders Reading This

If you find yourself submerged in detail, carrying tasks that were never yours to own, it may be time for your own Monkey Management moment. Not as a rebuke, but as a pause. A chance to notice which monkeys you are feeding, and why.

Delegation is not a failing. It is a leadership skill. One that is rarely neat, often awkward, and absolutely necessary.

And perhaps most importantly, it creates the space to lead with intention rather than simply react. To guide, to enable, and to focus on the work that only you can do.