The Reluctant Delegator
A small business owner who had built his company from nothing struggled to hand off responsibilities, convinced that no one else could do things as well as he could. The business had stopped growing not because of a lack of demand, but because every decision, however small, still ran through him personally. Applying honest self-reflection, he recognized the real issue wasn't his team's competence — it was his own difficulty trusting anyone else with decisions he'd always made himself. Using the GROW model, he set a specific goal (delegate three recurring decisions within two months), assessed the real obstacle honestly (a fear of losing control, not evidence of his staff's actual ability), explored options (starting with lower-stakes decisions, building a simple approval process for anything above a certain threshold), and committed to a concrete first step that week. Within the two months, his team was making solid decisions independently, and he'd freed up enough time to focus on the strategic growth the business had been missing.