A CEO should keep direction, the key people decisions and the big money calls, and hand off almost everything else. The tool that makes it work is a written decision rights sheet: who decides what, up to what limit, and who must be told. Without it, every question still ends up on your desk.
Delegating tasks vs delegating as a CEO
When you start out, delegating means handing off tasks: invoices, scheduling, a client report. The guide on how to delegate tasks covers that.
As CEO of a team, the job changes. You hand over whole areas, such as sales, delivery or finance, together with the authority to make decisions inside them. You stop managing steps and start managing results. Your direct reports become your main way of getting work done.
In the Harvard study How CEOs Manage Time by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, 46% of the CEOs' time with employees involved one or more direct reports, according to MGMA's summary. The same CEOs spent 72% of their work time in meetings. If every decision needs you in the room, those hours fill fast.
What a CEO keeps
- Direction: where the company is going, the yearly goals and the few priorities for this quarter.
- People: choosing, managing and, when needed, replacing the leadership team.
- Culture: the standards for how people work and treat clients.
- Money: the budget, pricing strategy, large contracts, borrowing and raising money.
- Decisions that are hard to undo: entering a new market, a merger, closing a line of business.
- Your most important relationships: key clients, partners, investors, the board.
Everything else is a candidate to hand off.
What to hand off
- Daily operations and scheduling.
- Hiring below your direct reports, within an agreed plan.
- Routine client work and client service.
- Purchases and spending inside the budget.
- Most pricing within agreed ranges and discount limits.
- Reporting, admin and your calendar.
- Status meetings you only attend to listen.
Set decision rights
Most CEOs who struggle to delegate have handed over the work but not the decisions. People do the task, then come back to ask what to do next.
Jeff Bezos gave a useful way to sort decisions in Amazon's 2015 letter to shareholders. A few decisions are hard or impossible to reverse. They deserve slow, careful thought, and often the CEO. Most decisions can be reversed if they turn out wrong. Those should be made quickly by the people closest to the work. He warned that growing companies tend to use the slow process for everything.
Use four levels of authority for each type of decision:
- Decide. They decide and act. No need to tell you.
- Decide and inform. They decide and act, then tell you in the weekly update.
- Recommend. They bring a recommendation. You decide.
- CEO decides. You decide, after asking for input if needed.
Most decisions should sit at level 1 or 2. If your sheet has most items at level 3 or 4, you have not delegated yet.
Template: decision rights sheet
Leader: [name] Area: [for example, operations] Reviewed: every quarter
Level 1. You decide
- Team schedules and workload
- Supplier choice within budget
- Purchases up to $[amount]
Level 2. You decide, then inform me
- Hires within the approved headcount plan
- Discounts up to [X]%
- Client refunds up to $[amount]
Level 3. You recommend, I decide
- New roles outside the plan
- Spending above $[amount] or outside the budget
- Changes to how a service is priced
Level 4. I decide
- Annual budget and goals
- Leadership hires and exits
- Contracts above $[amount]
- Anything legal, or that could affect the company's reputation
Weekly update includes: level 2 decisions made, any problems, any level 3 recommendations.
Agree the sheet with each leader in person. Ask them where they want more authority, and where they feel unsure. Raise limits as trust builds.
Rules that make it stick
- Ask for a recommendation with every question. What would you do, and why?
- When a question falls inside their area, send it back. Do not answer it.
- Agree the result and the deadline, not the method.
- Check in at agreed points, such as a weekly one-on-one, instead of watching every step.
- When a decision goes wrong, fix the rule or the information, then leave the decision with them.
- Tell the rest of the team who now owns what, so they stop coming to you.
Get help for yourself
Some of what fills a CEO's day is support work: the calendar, email, travel, meeting notes, reports. An executive assistant can take much of it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for executive secretaries and executive administrative assistants at $76,590 a year in May 2025, in US dollars.
If you still run daily operations yourself, a general or operations manager is often the bigger relief. The BLS lists a median of $105,770 a year for general and operations managers in May 2025. Pay differs by city, industry and country. For the hiring process, see how to write a job description.
Red flags that you are not delegating
- Your team waits for you before acting on routine work.
- Work slows when you travel.
- You redo work others have finished.
- You are in most meetings, including ones you only listen to.
- Your direct reports cannot name what they are allowed to decide.
- You spend more time on operations than on direction and people.
When delegated work comes back wrong, the cause is often unclear expectations. Give clear feedback early. See how to give feedback to an employee. For the weekly rhythm with your leaders, use this team meeting agenda.
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