You can delegate the work. You cannot delegate the responsibility.
That distinction gets lost in a lot of strata schemes, and it gets lost for understandable reasons. Committee members are volunteers. They have jobs. The subject matter is technical, the legislation is dense, and there is always someone professional in the room who seems better placed to decide. So decisions drift — not through any single act, but one meeting at a time, until the committee is approving things it hasn’t really considered.
Nothing dramatic happens when that occurs. That’s the problem. It shows up years later, in a capital works fund that’s short, a contract nobody remembers agreeing to, or a defect that was reported once and never followed through.
Why it happens
It’s worth being fair about this, because over-delegation is rarely laziness.
Most committee members are doing this in the evenings, unpaid, on top of full-time work. The material is genuinely difficult — fire safety obligations, capital works forecasting, contract terms, by-law enforcement. Nobody joins a committee because they want to become an expert in backflow prevention.
And the people in the room who do this for a living are, in most cases, good at their jobs and giving sound advice. Deferring to them feels sensible. Often it is.
The failure isn’t trusting professionals. It’s losing track of which decisions were actually yours to make.
What’s fine to delegate
Almost all of the doing.
Administration, record-keeping, levy collection, meeting logistics, correspondence, insurance paperwork, contractor engagement and supervision, maintenance scheduling, compliance tracking — that’s what you engage a strata manager and a building manager for, and doing it yourself is a poor use of volunteer evenings.
If your committee is chasing quotes or ringing plumbers, something has gone wrong in the other direction.
What shouldn’t be delegated
The judgements. Specifically:
What the building’s condition actually is. Not the inspection — that’s a professional’s job. But the committee should know, in plain terms, what condition the major elements are in and what’s coming. If you can’t describe the state of your building’s plant, roofing and hydraulics in a sentence each, you’re approving budgets without knowing what they’re for.
How much the scheme is setting aside, and why. The capital works forecast is a set of assumptions about what will need replacing and when. Those assumptions are the committee’s to interrogate. A forecast that keeps levies comfortable by deferring everything is a decision to pass costs to whoever owns the lot in ten years — and that’s a choice, not an accounting outcome.
Who the scheme is contracted to, and on what terms. Agreements get renewed by default far more often than they get reviewed. Know what your scheme has signed, what each agreement requires, and when each one expires.
Whether work actually got done. Not inspecting it yourself — asking the question. A committee that routinely asks “was that closed out, and how do we know?” gets a different standard of service than one that doesn’t, from everyone involved.
Anything that changes the building or the by-laws. Those are owners’ decisions in a way that operational matters aren’t.
Signs you’ve handed over too much
Minutes record decisions nobody at the meeting remembers discussing
The committee learns about expenditure after it happens rather than before
Nobody can say when the current agreements expire
Reports arrive the day before the meeting, or not at all
“That’s been handled” is accepted without anyone asking how
The same defect appears in three consecutive reports and nobody escalates
Any one of those is normal on a busy quarter. All of them together is a pattern.
Staying involved isn’t more work
This is the part that gets misunderstood. An engaged committee isn’t one that meets more often or reads every invoice. It’s one that asks better questions at the same meetings.
Four questions, asked consistently, will do most of the work:
What’s changed in the building’s condition since we last met?
What’s coming in the next twelve months that we should be planning for?
What’s outstanding from last meeting, and why?
What do you need a decision from us on?
That’s ten minutes of a meeting. It changes what gets brought to you, because the people reporting know the questions are coming.
The uncomfortable bit
Everyone else in the arrangement is paid. The strata manager, the building manager, the contractors, the consultants — all professionals doing a job, most of them well.
The committee is the only party whose own money is at stake and who lives with the result. That’s not a reason to distrust anyone. It is a reason to stay in the room.
A good building manager wants an engaged committee, for a straightforward reason: it’s much easier to get a necessary thing approved when the people approving it understand why it’s necessary. The committees that ask the most questions are usually the ones whose buildings are in the best condition — and that’s not a coincidence.
