9

“Delegating with Joy”

A Women at Work Interview with Tiffany Dufu

Quick Takes

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This is Women at Work. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. In 2008 Tiffany Dufu had a high-powered job dedicated to getting more women into government. She was also raising a 2-year-old with her husband. Then, during the Great Recession her husband got laid off. Tiffany became the sole breadwinner as well as the meal planner, childcare expert, and life organizer. It was all too much, and one day she came home to find her out-of-work husband watching basketball on the couch. “What’s for dinner?” he asked. Overwhelmed, she screamed back, “You tell me!” It was a turning point in their relationship and her career and started a series of conversations between the two of them over what it really meant to have it all.

As they started to figure it out together, Tiffany began to do the kind of ruthless delegating and time protecting that most women think isn’t possible. And she noticed that although she wanted to talk to other women about her life’s work, getting more women into leadership roles, women kept asking her for advice on how to get more done in less time. She realized the two would have to go together, so she wrote a book about it called Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less. Nicole Torres and I talked with her about how she’s helping other woman to not get lost in their work.

NICOLE TORRES: So, what is the advice that you now give to other women?

TIFFANY DUFU: Well, I definitely tell them to drop the ball. I used to be someone who was terrified of ever dropping a ball. If I did, it meant to me that I was failing to take timely action. I was disappointing myself. I was disappointing the other people in my life who loved me in my particular place. I was disappointing the entire black race, which sounds dramatic, but that is actually how it felt.

I decided to reappropriate the term. For me, dropping the ball means releasing these unrealistic expectations that all of us face, no matter who we are, about who we should be. It means figuring out what really matters most to you and what your highest and best use is, and meaningfully engaging the people in your life to support you in your journey. My biggest piece of advice is, first of all, just figure out what matters to you most.

SGC: Part of dropping the ball is not just that things don’t get done; it’s that you have to delegate them to other people, right? And in the book you talk about the trap of imaginary delegation, and it struck me that, oh my God, that’s what I’m doing wrong! So, tell us about that.

TD: Imaginary delegation is this phenomenon where you assign someone a task, and you fully expect them to complete the task, and when they don’t, you become annoyed, sometimes even angry . . . but you never actually tell them verbally that you assigned the task to them. And then when common sense prevails and you say to yourself, “You know, I never actually told him to take out the recycling,” you quickly snap back at common sense, “Well, nobody has to tell me to take out the recycling around here.” If you’re someone who ever walks into your home or your office and thinks to yourself, “Am I the only person who can see that X, Y, or Z needs to be done?” you’re probably doing a little bit of imaginary delegating. And I used imaginary delegation for a long time to try to engage people in my life, especially my husband, to do things to support me. And you know, it just doesn’t work because people don’t know what’s inside of your head. So I had to learn how to not only stop imaginary delegating, but then figure out to delegate with joy to really get the support that I needed.

SGC: Explain that. How do you delegate with joy—do you just have to accept that you need to be the delegator? Because I do run into that, like you say, that it’s Wednesday night, the recycling always goes out Wednesday night, I shouldn’t have to ask anyone else to do it.

TD: It’s really tough because in the world that we live in, it’s not fair, but women are socially conditioned to tie their value to things like whether or not the recycling is taken out. And men are not. So that’s part of the reason why women see those things. But the other piece of this is if there is something that is happening in your home on a regular basis that you’re not responsible for, sometimes it can be invisible to you too.

So I created a list of all the things that were required in order for us to manage our home. The idea was for my husband and me to divide the responsibilities on the list between the two of us. But instead, he wanted to add more to the list, and I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be added to the list, since I was the one who did everything and I knew what was on the list. As it turns out, there were a number of things, like watering plants. It dawned on me: You know, they are alive, and I never water them. So those kinds of experiences help you to understand that taking out the recycling is in your column and you see that, but it really would require an act on your part to help other people see it. Delegating with joy is just putting a task and an ask in a much higher context, a more important context than just being a chore.

I started delegating with joy with just two things that I needed my husband to do, which seems so small, but it was such a big deal to me. To begin, I did what I would do at work: I scheduled. I picked a time that didn’t conflict with any sporting event, because he’s addicted to pretty much every sport, and I sat him down, and I said, “Hey, I want to talk to you.

“Lately I’ve been really stressed, and I feel like it’s having a negative impact on our relationship and my ability to do really amazing things in the world. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I figured out what matters most to me, and I feel like there’s a bunch of things that I’m doing that don’t really ladder up to that. And you are my biggest cheerleader and my biggest champion, and I know that we started this journey together because we committed to supporting one another, and I was wondering, in the interest of helping me figure out how to be my best self, if you could do a couple of things. And when I tell you what they are, you’re going to be like, ‘Why didn’t you just send me a text message? Why are you giving me this big speech?’ But babe, that’s how important these two things are to me. One is that you take out the recycling and the other is that you pick up the dry cleaning.”

SGC: There you go. You start small and build on success. The book is full of great advice. Do you ever struggle to follow your own excellent advice?

TD: Oh, all the time. Every day. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, we’re all on a journey. I do have some practices that help me tremendously. For example I have a “drop the ball” question that I ask myself multiple times a day, especially when I’ve got a lot of emails in my inbox and a lot of deadlines, which is basically “Will responding to this email or answering this phone call or saying yes to this committee put me to my highest and best use in achieving the things that matter most to me, which are having a really healthy partnership, raising my children as conscious global citizens, and advancing women and girls?” And if the answer is yes, I’m like, OK, let me stop and just figure out how I might be able to make this happen. But most of the time the answer is no, and I move on. There are consequences to dropping the ball, but I certainly move on knowing that I’m doing what I need to do in order to create a life that I’m passionate about.

Adapted from Women at Work episode 6, “The Advice We Get and Give,” March 8, 2018.