When everything still comes back to the founder.
By Pablo Borzone · Strategic Clarity Advisor
You can delegate a task and still be the person everyone needs to finish it.
Someone else does the work. You still supply the missing information, approve the exception or decide what takes priority.
From your side, this can look like a team that needs too much direction. From theirs, it may be difficult to know how far their responsibility extends.
Before asking people to take more ownership, it is worth looking at what they can actually do without you.
Growth made our dependency visible
At Nazca, our family business in Buenos Aires, my family and I worked in the operation ourselves. Much of what made the business work depended on what we knew and did in person.
When schools began asking us to operate inside their institutions, that way of working reached a practical limit.
There were more places to run than family members to run them.
We needed other teams to operate the business without one of us constantly standing beside them. That meant making more of the operation explicit: what needed to happen, how it would be recorded and how we would know whether it was working.
My contribution was to design that structure.
The work involved software for pricing and sales, product and service records, operating sheets, controls and repeatable routines. Much of it was simple and practical. Its value was in how the pieces worked together.
We could understand what was happening without being physically present throughout the day.
What we developed at Nazca became part of the model we carried into Kiosco del Cole: different teams and locations, supported by a common way of working.
The lesson was bigger than the procedures themselves. A business could grow beyond our physical presence only when more of what made it work was available to other people.
The same symptom can hide different problems
A founder receiving the same question repeatedly may be looking at a training gap.
But the person asking may already know how to do the work. They may be missing information, facing conflicting priorities or waiting for a decision they have never been authorised to make.
Those situations can all produce the same interruption. They need different responses.
If only you have the information, asking someone to be more decisive does little to help. If two people believe a decision belongs to them, another checklist will not settle the responsibility. If you have delegated the task but retained every approval, the work is still designed to return to you.
This is where a problem described as “delegation” can turn out to involve communication, roles, trust or the way decisions are made.
It is also where a founder’s own habits deserve examination. A team may hesitate when decisions are routinely taken back or changed without explanation. The uncertainty is then part of the working relationship, not simply a lack of initiative.
Some decisions should remain with you. The aim is to distinguish those that genuinely need your judgement from those that reach you because nobody has established another way.
Start with one decision that keeps returning
You do not need to begin by redesigning the whole organisation.
Take one recurring decision and follow it from the moment it arises to the moment it reaches you.
Look at who encounters it first, what they know, what they are responsible for and what they are allowed to decide. Then look at what you contribute when the decision finally arrives.
Are you supplying information? Resolving a conflict? Setting a priority? Giving permission?
That contribution is a useful clue.
Ask:
What would have to be clear for this decision to be made without me?
The answer might be a clearer responsibility, access to information, an agreed standard or a boundary within which someone can act. It might also reveal that the decision belongs with you after all.
Either way, you have something more useful to work with than a general instruction to “delegate more”.
At Nazca, the opportunity to expand made our dependency impossible to ignore. In another business, it may become visible through repeated delays, unresolved questions or a founder who cannot step away.
The point is to understand what keeps bringing the work back before deciding what to change.
If too much of your business still depends on your involvement, we can start with a focused conversation about where that dependency sits and whether a deeper diagnostic would be useful.
Around 25 minutes · No charge
Pablo Borzone
Strategic Clarity Advisor
© 2026 Pablo Borzone. All rights reserved.
Amsterdam · Working internationally