I had such a great conversation with Gina Cotner, founder and CEO of Athena Executive Services, and I have a feeling this one is going to hit home for a lot of you.

If you have ever told yourself, it is just easier to do it myself, you are in good company. I have said that more times than I can count. But Gina made me see that the resistance we feel around delegation is not really about the task. It is about trust, and trust is built through relationship.

Gina started Athena Executive Services 10 years ago after a somewhat unexpected path that led her from being an executive assistant herself to building a firm that now pairs high-caliber, US-based virtual executive assistants with busy entrepreneurs and executives across the country. She now runs the whole operation in about 10 hours a week, and she is living proof that when you delegate well and lead with genuine care for the people around you, you get your life back.

What I loved most about this conversation was how Gina connected the dots between delegation and accountability. Most of us think of those as two separate challenges. Gina sees them as deeply linked, and the thread running through both is the quality of the relationship.

Key Takeaways

• Better done than perfect. The 80 percent rule is your friend. If someone can get a task 80 percent done while you focus on something else, that is a win worth taking.
• When you delegate, make it theirs. Gina's approach is to hand over the outcome, not the steps. Tell someone where you want to end up and then ask, what do you need from me? That simple shift puts the thinking where it belongs.
• Relationship is what makes accountability possible. The richer your background of connection with someone, the easier it is to hold them to their commitments without it feeling like an attack. Gina puts it simply: you are addressing their actions, not them as a person.
• Ask what, not anything. The word what opens a conversation. The word anything shuts it down. Swapping one for the other changes the quality of every check-in you have with your team.
• Start somewhere, even small. You do not need a full executive assistant to begin delegating. Make a list of the rote tasks you do every week and find one thing to hand off. Even one hour of relief matters.

You can find Gina at: athenaexecutiveservices.com or on LinkedIn at: www.linkedin.com/in/athenaea

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