I ended up delegating it accidentally. During my parental leave, I asked a few of my teammates to sub for me while I was out. When I came back, the meeting was running better than I’d left it. The presenters came in more prepared, the content was better organized, and even our introductions felt more fun.

That was when I realized my mistake. I should have handed off that meeting a long time ago. I felt tied to it because it had become habitual, even a part of my identity. And yet, in my absence, the organizers breathed new life into it. They were excited for the challenge, and I was able to focus on other priorities. Everybody won.

The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.

From this, you can extrapolate that anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.

As I described at the beginning of the book, many organizations impose on you processes and tools that appear to have been designed to deliberately distance you from who you really are. Your unique loves, your uniqueness in general, runs counter to the organization’s need for uniformity—of products, services, even values—and so the goal of work is experienced by you as an ongoing effort to make you as much as possible like every other salesperson, housekeeper, teacher, manager, nurse, machinist, or whatever your role might be.

Wrongheaded though this is, you’re not going to be able to recreate your organization’s talent management practices all by yourself. Yes, folks like me and others are trying to influence your leaders to throw out these uniformity-focused talent practices in favor of more individualized ones, but this will take a few years. What can you do in the meanwhile? You want to find love in your work, you want to be seen for your whole, authentic self at work, and for the very best of you. How can you pull this off, when so many of the tools and technologies and processes at work are trying—well intendedly—to smother you?

It is not helpful to feel sorry for ourselves. I’m sure our employees don’t need any rah-rah speeches. We need leadership and a sense of direction and momentum, not just from me but from all of us. I don’t want to see a lot of prophets of doom around here. I want can-do people looking for short-term victories and long-term excitement.” I told them there was no time to focus on who created our problems. I had no interest in that. “We have little time to spend on problem definition. We must focus our efforts on solutions and actions.

I have been in movement spaces for a long time, and we have a way of doing things that is so steeped in critique that I have often wondered if we would strangle movement before it could blossom. Sometimes I think we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, and sometimes I think we do it to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn’t work out. Critique, alone, can keep us from having to pick up the responsibility of figuring out solutions. Sometimes I think we need to liberate ourselves from critique, both internal and external, to truly give change a chance.

There are way too many people in critique mode who belong to no formation, who spend their lives writing volunteer think pieces in 140 character bursts of Internet. It makes me feel defensive of the messy chaotic beauty of transformation. Uprisings and resistance and mass movement require a tolerance of messiness, a tolerance of many, many paths being walked on at once.