Decoded: “I don’t understand how you want me to handle this.”

Decoded: What Your Project Partners Are Really Saying

“I don’t understand how you want me to handle this.”

The Intro

Assistants. Junior designers. Project coordinators. That team member you finally hired so you could get out of the weeds, who somehow keeps coming back to you with questions you thought you’d already answered.

Working with support staff is one of the best things you can do for your business, and one of the most frustrating when it’s not clicking. 

The Ask

“I don’t understand how you want me to handle this.”

What They’re Really Saying

What you hear is that your team member doesn’t know enough about the industry yet. What they might actually mean is that they don’t have enough context to know how to handle it well.

Think about what that looks like in practice. You forward an email and say, “Can you take care of this?” Your team member stares at it trying to figure out whether that means reply on your behalf, draft something for you to review, loop in the vendor, update the project tracker, or all of the above. They don’t want to do the wrong thing, so they either ask and feel like they’re bothering you, or they guess and get it wrong.

For example, your team member might not know what’s theirs to own versus what you want to stay close to. They might not know what outcome you’re expecting, or by when. They might not know whether you want them to organize something, communicate on your behalf, make a call, or just pull something together for your review. They might not know what’s already been done, what changed, or what standard you want applied.

Where It Goes Wrong

The symptoms are easy to misread because they look the same on the surface. Hesitation. Repeated questions. Slower follow-through. Work that comes back needing more revision than expected. And the conclusion feels obvious: your team member just doesn’t know the industry well enough to continue working for you.

What you’re forgetting is that you know the background, the usual sequence, which details matter and which ones can wait. You know what this client expects, what happened with that vendor two months ago, and what “done right” looks like because you’ve done it dozens of times. Your team member often knows almost none of that, not because they couldn’t understand it, but because it never fully made it to them.

Let’s say you drop a task in their queue mid-project: “Follow up with the workroom on the drapery timeline and let the client know where things stand.” 

To you, that’s a clear, simple ask. To your team member, it’s a puzzle. Does “let the client know” mean send an email, or wait for you to review it first? Is there anything sensitive about the workroom situation they should know going in? What do they say if the workroom hasn’t responded yet?

They could ask all of that, but if every task requires that kind of back-and-forth before anything moves, your team member isn’t saving you time. If your process only runs smoothly when your team member is persistent enough to hunt down what they need, it’s costing you money.

How to Solve It

Contrary to what you may think, the fix is a cleaner handoff not more industry knowledge. 

When you assign a task, your team member needs to know a few things before they can do it well: what the task actually is, what outcome you want, what they’re authorized to do on their own versus what needs your sign-off, relevant background they wouldn’t otherwise have, and any deadline or priority context. That doesn’t have to be a long briefing. It just has to be enough.

A few habits that make a real difference:

• Be specific about the action. “Handle this” leaves too much open. “Draft a reply and send it to me before you respond” or “Go ahead and send this, just CC me” gives your team member something to work with.
• Share the backstory when it matters. If there’s a reason this client needs extra care, or a history with this vendor your team member should know about, say so. A sentence or two can save a lot of back-and-forth later.
• Clarify what done looks like. Does the task end when they send the email, when they get a response, or when they update the project notes? They shouldn’t have to guess.
• Make your standards repeatable. If there are things you always want done a certain way, document them. Even a short reference doc your team member can check before reaching out on your behalf will cut down on questions over time.

The goal is to have a better hand off so your team member can actually run with it.

How Mydoma Can Help

When project information is scattered across emails, texts, and separate folders, team members can lose time just figuring out where things stand before they can do anything. Mydoma keeps more of that story in one place, which means cleaner handoffs and fewer gaps.

A few ways it helps specifically with delegation:

• Tasks let you assign work directly inside the project, with due dates, notes, and context attached. Instead of a forwarded email with “can you handle this,” your team member gets a task that tells them what it is, when it’s due, and what they need to know.
• The Message Center keeps client and team communication tied to the project, so your team member isn’t piecing together a thread from three different places before they can respond or follow up.
• Your project’s Products & Services keeps your selections, specifications, and product information current and tied to the project. Team members aren’t hunting through old emails trying to figure out which version of a spec is the right one.
• Orders and invoices live in the project too, so your team member can see exactly where things stand without having to track you down or dig through a separate system.
• File sharing in your project’s Files & Media means the documents and supporting materials your team member needs are in the project where they can find them, not buried in someone’s inbox or saved to a personal drive.
• And because client and vendor information lives in your Studio, your team member has the contacts, details, and context they need without having to ask you where to find them.

All of it together means your team member can walk into a project and actually understand what’s happening, what’s been handled, and what still needs to move, without needing you to brief them from scratch every time.

Plug & Play: The Task Brief Template

Copy this and at least look at it every time you hand off a task. The more of this information that you give your team members, the less they have to come back and ask.

Task: [What specifically needs to happen]

What “done” looks like: [What’s the end result? An email sent? A response received? Notes updated in the project?]

Deadline: [Date or time, or priority relative to other things on their plate]

The team member can: [What they’re authorized to do on their own, e.g. “reply directly,” “place the order,” “schedule the call”]

The team member should check with you before: [Anything that needs your sign-off first, e.g. “sending anything to the client,” “confirming a date,” “going over X amount”]

Background they need to know: [Anything about this client, vendor, or project they wouldn’t already have, e.g. “this client prefers communication by email only,” “we had an issue with this vendor last month, keep the tone neutral”]

Files, contacts, or notes they’ll need: [Where to find them, ideally with a direct link to the Mydoma project]

The first few times you use this it might feel like a lot but once your team member knows what to expect from a handoff, things move a lot faster. (Pro tip: Since you’re explaining the task anyway, consider also putting that same information into a how-to document for the task.)

Ready to Make Delegation Actually Work?

If your team member keeps coming back with questions, or tasks keep coming back half-done, the handoff is usually where things have broken down. Mydoma gives you a place to assign work, share context, and keep the project story in one place so your team can move without you in the middle of every step.