The Hardest Part About Being Dependable Is That Everyone Gets Comfortable Depending on You

On the guilt of delegation, the trap of being too good at your job, and five ways to let your board actually help without losing your mind.

The worst part about doom scrolling on social media at the end of the day to mentally come down from your daily meeting bonanza or Zoom-topia experience for the previous 8 hours of your life, is that none of the things you see, watch or hear are calming at all.

It is, by far, the worst thing for your brain.

You have to navigate around all the passive aggressive bragging on LinkedIn or scroll past the 90 paid & suggested posts on Facebook, or stop before you’re rage baited into commenting on someone’s not-so-hot-take that is so off the rails you wonder how on earth you become friends online in the first place and then realize you just accept any and all friend requests and you don’t have the energy to do deep research on how you know that person.

…or, even worse, coming across a quote that, for some mythical or universe-is-speaking-directly-at-you reason, hits you in the face when all you wanted was for your brain to stop working, and now you’re questioning why the algorithm has some sort of vendetta against you.

Like this one I saw the other day:

“The hardest part about being dependable is that everyone around you gets comfortable depending on you.”

Huh.

Well, that’s not fair.

It appears that this is no ordinary random quote.

It appears that it’s a diagnosis.

Of me.

And of you.

And of every nonprofit professional who has ever thought “it’s just easier if I do it myself.”

Because it IS easier if you do it yourself.

And boy-oh-boy, is it also the world’s most diabolical professional trap.

Dare I give it an official title?

It’s The Dependability Trap. Catchy ain’t it?

Here’s how it works. And let me know if this sounds familiar.

You started this job being helpful.

You’re amazingly responsive.

You’re super duper Reliable.

You said yes to things. You followed through. You did excellent work. And people noticed. Your ED noticed. Your board noticed. Your donors noticed.

And because you were so good at doing things, more things got assigned to you. And because you kept doing them well, even MORE things got assigned to you. And somewhere along the way, the organization stopped developing systems and started developing a dependency.

On you.

YOU write the appeal. YOU plan the event. YOU manage the database. YOU make the donor calls. YOU write the grant. YOU handle the board communication. YOU do the social media. YOU fix the printer.

YOU answer the phone from the angry donor who is upset you sent them a sticker as part of your marketing plan and they are yelling at you because they don’t want their gift wasted on such things, even though it cost less than 1/10^th of the cost of a stamp but you’re now good at diffusing aggressive humans better than anyone else in the office.

Because every time someone else tried to do one of those things, it wasn’t quite right. And so you either redid it yourself or just stopped asking.

And now you’re wearing more hats than are fashionably acceptable, drowning in tasks, burning out - and the cruelest part?

You built a super awesome machine that’s crushing you.

Not on purpose of course. And not because you’re a control freak.

Because you’re dependable.

And dependability, left unchecked, becomes a prison made of other people’s comfort.

(Ohhhh, that’s a good quote.)

It appears to me that the best fundraisers are also the worse delegators.

I’ve coached hundreds of nonprofit professionals. And I can tell you with confidence: the BEST fundraisers (you know, the ones who build the deepest relationships, who raise the most money, who care the most about the mission) are almost always the worst at asking for help.

And it’s not because they don’t know they should delegate. They know. They’ve read the blogs. They’ve attended the workshops. They’ve nodded along when someone said “you need to empower your board.”

They don’t delegate because of two fears that you hold on desperately like my and my unwillingness to listen to any new music on the radio because my brain lives in the late 90’s and nothing is better than grunge music and I’ll die on that hill alone and never knowing who or what an Ella Langley is:

Fear #1: “If I ask them to do it, they won’t do it well enough, and I’ll have to redo it anyway.”

Sound familiar? You ask a board member to make five thank-you calls. They make two. Poorly. With no follow-up notes. And now you’ve spent more time managing the task than it would have taken to just do it yourself. So next time, you just do it yourself.

Fear #2: “If I ask them to do it, they’ll think I’m dumping work on them, and they’ll resent me.”

Oh! My Catholic Guilt hackles just peaked! You know your board members are volunteers. They have jobs. They have families. They’re giving their time. And asking them to do MORE feels like you’re being ungrateful for what they already give. So you absorb the work yourself, smile through the exhaustion, and wonder why nobody offers to help.

Oh, by the way…they don’t offer help because they don’t know you need it.

Because you’ve been so dependable for so long that everyone assumes you’ve got it handled.

You trained them to depend on you. And now you resent the dependency you created.

That’s not their fault. And really, it’s not yours either. It’s a system problem. And modern system problems need modern system solutions.

What are they, you ask? I got you Boo!

Five Things You Can Do Right Now to Delegate Without the Guilt

1.    Start With the Task, Not the Person

Most delegation fails because we start by thinking “who can I ask to do this?” and then we imagine all the ways they’ll screw it up and we spiral and we end up doing it ourselves.

So, let’s flip it.

Start with the task. Write down everything on your plate. Then put each task into one of three categories:

Only I can do this. The donor meeting. The major gift ask. The strategic planning. The stuff that requires YOUR relationships, YOUR expertise, YOUR judgment.

Someone else could do this with guidance. Thank-you calls. Social media posts. Event logistics. Data entry. These tasks don’t require YOU. They require instructions.

This doesn’t need to happen at all. The zombie tasks. The “we’ve always done it” tasks. Kill them (Come on friends, we’ve talked about this dammit! HA!)

Category two is your delegation list. Not everything. Just category two. And you’ll probably be surprised how much of your week lives there.

2.    Give the Recipe, Not Just the Ingredients

Here’s where most delegation goes sideways…because it’s where I have the biggest problem…and I assume a lot of you do too.  

You hand someone a task and say “can you handle this?” and they say “sure!” and then they do it completely differently than you would have and you quietly fix it at 10 PM and vow to never delegate again.

That’s not a delegation failure. That’s an instruction failure.

Don’t just tell them WHAT to do. Tell them HOW you need it done.

“Can you make five thank-you calls?” is a vague wish.

“Here are five donors. Call each one this week. Use this script as a starting point. Keep the call under 3 minutes. Log the call in the spreadsheet I shared with you. If someone wants to talk longer, great - just note it. If they don’t answer, leave a voicemail using this template.”

THERE! It’s a recipe. A delicious recipe! And recipes get followed. Vague instructions get interpreted. And interpretations are where the mental spiral begins.

Yes, it takes 10 minutes to write the recipe.

But that 10 minutes saves you the three hours you would have spent either doing it yourself or fixing someone else’s version.

3.    Lower the Bar (On Purpose)

This one feels wrong. But hear me out.

Your standard for a thank-you call is, let’s say, a 4-minute personalized conversation that references the donor’s last gift, mentions a specific program impact, and ends with a warm close.

That’s YOUR standard. Built over years of practice. Refined through hundreds of calls.

A board member’s first thank-you call is going to be 90 seconds of awkward small talk that ends with “uh, thanks for your support, K bye.”

And that is FINE.

Because an awkward 90-second call from a board member is infinitely better than no call at all.

And no call at all is what you’re currently delivering while you “plan to get to it” between the 97 other things on your list.

Done at 70% by someone else beats perfect-but-never-happening by you. Every time.

Lower the bar for others. Not because they’re incapable of reaching yours. Because they need to START before they can improve. And you need to let them start badly the same way you once started badly.

Remember YOUR first phone call? The one where you got hung up on or called the person by the wrong name? (Oh…just me?) You got better. They will too. But only if you let them begin.

4.    Delegate the Outcome, Not the Process

This is the control freak cure. And I say that with love, as a currently-in-recovery-control-freak myself.

When you delegate a task and then micromanage HOW it gets done, you haven’t actually delegated anything. You’ve just created a fun little puppet show where you’re doing all the work from behind a curtain while someone else moves their mouth.

Try this instead: give them the outcome and let them figure out the how.

“I need three donor introductions by the end of the month.”

There. That’s the outcome.

HOW they make those introductions (email, phone call, backyard BBQ, WWI-esque carrier pigeon) that’s up to them. Maybe they’ll do it differently than you would. Maybe their way is worse. But maybe - and this is the part that scares super dependable people - maybe their way is actually better.

Because they have relationships and approaches you don’t.

You will never discover what your board is capable of if you script every move. Give them a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Let them make choices…and just hope they don’t fall into a pit and get eaten by an OwlBear.

5.    Make the Ask About the Mission, Not About You

Ahhhhh, the guilt killer.

When you ask a board member to help with fundraising, your brain frames it as: “I’m asking them to do MY job because I can’t handle it.”

So, let’s try a bit of a reframe.

You’re not asking them to do your job. You’re inviting them to serve the mission they volunteered to serve.

They didn’t join this board to attend meetings. They joined because they care about what your organization does. And right now, the way they can BEST serve that mission is by making three phone calls, or writing two notes, or introducing you to someone who should know about this work.

That’s not dumping work. That’s honoring their commitment. (See how much better than feels!?!?)

And here’s the thing nobody tells you: most board members WANT to help more.

They just don’t know how. And they’re waiting for someone to ask them directly, specifically, with a clear task and a clear timeline.

That someone is you! Hooray!

Now, being dependable is a beautiful quality.

It’s why people trust you. It’s why donors renew. It’s why your organization runs.

But dependability without delegation is a slow-motion burnout story. And we’ve all read enough of those.

The goal is not to become undependable. The goal is to become dependable AND supported. To be the person everyone trusts AND the person who has a team around them capable of carrying some of the weight.

Hell, you built the machine. You can rebuild it.

But with way more hands.

That’s not letting go of control. That’s crafting something bigger than yourself.

And isn’t that why you got into this amazing nonprofit work in the first place?

OK! Your turn!

Tell me:

What’s the one task you’ve been refusing to delegate - and what would change if you finally let someone else try?

Name it. Be honest about why you’re holding onto it. And then tell me what you’d do with the time if it wasn’t on your plate anymore.

Send me your answer: patrick@dogoodbetterconsulting.com

And if you want help building the delegation systems, the board activation frameworks, and the recipes that make hand-offs actually work - that’s exactly what we do inside Do Good YOUniversity. Templates, scripts, community, and a room full of people learning to share the weight. www.DoGoodYOUniversity.com

Together, we’ve freaking got this.

-Patrick

P.S. I wrote this entire blog by myself like a big boy! Without delegating a single paragraph. The irony is not lost on me. But in my defense, if I asked a board to write a fundraising blog, the results would be…let’s say “character-building.” Some things you delegate. Some things you hold. The fun part is knowing which is which. LOL