Choose your battles

There are two ways in which this matters.

In general, you want to make sure that you are fighting for things that matter and deferring on things that don’t matter as much. If you spend a lot of your time and energy arguing for things that aren’t meaningful, you’ll restrict your own bandwidth to do things that matter and you will frustrate your team.

The second way this matters is specifically related to things you’ve delegated. Once you delegate execution on something, you must also delegate some level of design or decision making on that thing. It is no longer yours to fully own.

This is important because the people to whom you delegate need to feel they own that thing. It is theirs. Then they can take pride in it and feel motivated to do the best work possible.

If you constantly micro-manage and second-guess them, they will realize they have only been delegated the execution part of the activity and not the decision-making part and they will often become less interested in doing it.

So choose your battles: only fight for things that matter, and tend to defer on things that don’t.

This can feel uncomfortable for control-freak types, but you just have to feel that discomfort in exchange for a higher-functioning organization.