You will be able to decide which hands-on work stays with you and which should move to your team.
Wei Ling was promoted to lead the customer operations team at a logistics company in Tampines three months ago. There are five people on the team, and until March she was one of them. She still handles the two biggest client accounts, still builds the monthly service report, and still answers the tricky escalations because she knows the history better than anyone. Her calendar audit from lesson 1.1, Your output is now your team's output, came out at 31 hours of doing and 9 of managing in a typical week.
Her first instinct was to drop everything hands-on at once. That would be a mistake too. This lesson is about where to draw the line.
If you lead a small team, you will almost certainly still do some of the work yourself. A team of four or five usually cannot spare a person whose whole job is managing, and nobody expects you to stop being useful overnight. Keeping some hands-on work also keeps you close to how the job feels right now: which tools are slow, which clients are difficult, where the handovers break.
So the question is never whether to keep any work. It is which work, and how much of your week it takes.
Go through your tasks one at a time and ask two questions about each.
Does this need my authority? Some work only you can do because of your role. Approving a refund above the team's limit, signing off a new process, choosing between two priorities your manager handed you, or telling a client that a deadline will move. These stay with you, because handing them to someone without the authority to do them sets that person up to fail.
Does this need context that only I have right now? Wei Ling was in the room when one client's contract was negotiated, so she knows why it has an unusual clause, and some of that client's work really does need her. Notice the words "right now", though. Context can be shared. If a task needs your context today but someone else could learn it in a few weeks with your help, it belongs on the hand-over side, with a plan for teaching it.
Everything else is work someone on your team could learn with support. That includes most of the work you were promoted for doing well. Wei Ling's monthly service report fails both tests. It needs no special authority, and the context lives in a spreadsheet anyone can read. She has been keeping it because she is fast at it and slightly proud of it.
Be honest with yourself about which tasks you are keeping because they are fun. Most new managers hold on to the work they enjoy most, such as the creative piece, the high-profile client or the problem nobody else has solved, and tell themselves no harm is done because the work still gets finished.
Your team reads it differently. When the manager keeps every interesting task and hands down the routine ones, people conclude that you do not trust them with anything that matters, and they are usually right. It also blocks the people who are ready to grow, because the stretch work they need is sitting on your desk.
Think about Arjun, the most experienced person on Wei Ling's team. He has six years in the industry and has never handled a top-tier client on his own, because first the previous manager and now Wei Ling kept those accounts. If she hands him one of the two big accounts, she gets back several hours a week and he gets the step up he has been waiting for. If she keeps both, she protects a habit and probably loses him within a year.
There is a simple way to tell whether you are keeping too much. Look at the work only a manager can do, like one-on-ones, feedback, planning and getting someone unstuck. Are any of those slipping because your own tasks ran over?
If you cancelled a one-on-one last week to finish a report, or kept meaning to tell someone their client email needed work and never found the time, your hands-on load is too high. That is the signal to move more work, whatever your calendar audit said. The right split depends on your team's size and your company. The wrong one shows up when the managing gets squeezed out first.
Wei Ling found two signs. She had moved Hui Min's one-on-one three weeks in a row, and she had not given anyone feedback on their work since the promotion, except to fix it herself late at night.
Here is how she sorted her own list. The two big accounts: keep one for now, hand the other to Arjun with a month of overlap. The monthly service report: hand over to Hui Min, who is newer but organised and has asked for more variety. The escalations: keep the ones that need a decision on refunds or contract terms, and let Arjun take first contact on the rest. Approving leave and rostering: keep, because they need her authority.
Notice she did not hand over everything at once, and she did not give tasks to whoever was least busy. Each task went to a person who would learn something from it. The handovers get planned properly in module 3. Today you only need to see your work clearly and put each task on one side of the line or the other.
Take your own task list, including the small recurring things that never make it onto a calendar, and sort it the same way.
List your current tasks in two columns, keep and hand over, and write the name of the person each handed-over task could go to.
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