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Do you struggle with how to delegate work?
Many of us do.
Some of us don’t like delegating because our staff don’t carry out tasks as well as we think we would and we find that frustrating. Others would love to delegate more but feel they don’t handle the process well and delegated projects go awry. Founders running an early-stage startup on a shoestring budget may simply feel they can’t afford to hire anyone to delegate to.
But the truth is that it’s critical to delegate. It’s one of the most valuable skills of successful business managers and leaders.
Here’s what I’m going to cover in this article:
The benefits of delegation
As an entrepreneur, your most valuable resource is your own time. A good rule of thumb is that you should take on work that only you can do and no more. If someone else could do it, delegate it.
As a founder entrepreneur, if you had enough time today to either pitch to win a new client or order new supplies, which option should you take? Right — pitch to win a new client.
If only you had time to work on developing an important new product or updating your quarterly budget for social media ads, which one should you choose? You get the picture.
If you don’t delegate, you’ll spend your time dealing with admin instead of developing your business. You’ll be sucked into dealing with things that are urgent but not important and be dragged away from doing things that are important but not urgent.
Unfortunately this pattern will keep repeating. So unless you delegate, you’ll actually never get to those big, important jobs that the future success of your business depends on.
When you start delegating effectively, things change. Not only do you free up your time for the tasks that are most important, there are other benefits too.
For example, you’ll feel more in control and less stressed. You’ll stop feeling overwhelmed by your endless to-do list. You may even reclaim a better work-life balance.
Before we jump into the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of delegation, let’s first knock on the head the most common pushbacks against what I’ve just said (for any holdouts who are not yet convinced of the need to delegate).
The reasons we don’t delegate
‘I can’t afford to hire someone to delegate to’
When you first launched your business, you were probably very cautious about spending money. If your business idea wasn’t yet proven, any money you put into it was at risk. You might have lost it all.
So your first office or factory may have been your kitchen table (or similar) and you did everything yourself. And that was the right approach — to limit your losses when the risks of failure were highest.
But once you see that your business idea is working, you need to change your mindset. If you want to turn your idea into a full-fledged business that can grow and thrive, you need to get comfortable with hiring people and delegating to them.
When you delegate, you spend money to buy more of your time. The revenue you can make by spending that time on things with high impact (e.g. winning customers) will far outweigh the costs you incurred to delegate.
‘My staff won’t do the job as well as I would’
You’re probably right. They will probably take longer over it than you would and the result probably won’t be as good as if you’d done it yourself.
But that’s not the point.
The right question to ask is: will they do it well enough? Will the result be satisfactory for whatever your purpose is? If it will, then that should be good enough.
Don’t apply a standard of perfection — it’s the wrong measure for judging the success or failure of delegation.
‘It’s quicker and easier to do it myself’
On this occasion, you’re right. It probably would be quicker and easier to do it yourself.
But most tasks you delegate aren’t one-offs. You’ll usually need to do the same task (or something very similar) more than once. Perhaps many times.
By the time your staff member has carried out the task several times over, they might be nearly as quick and as good at it as you are.
But if you never delegate it to them, how will they ever learn?
Delegating is inefficient the first time you do it but it’s very efficient in the long run.
‘I don’t like delegating — I want to know the task has been done properly’
The fact is, if you want your business to grow and be successful, you simply have to start delegating.
Actually there is another option.
Your business could just remain a small, one-person show, with you doing everything.
And you’ll be permanently overworked and exhausted. Don’t fall into a trap of just working harder to compensate. You’ll burn out.
If you’re not a natural delegator, here’s a mental trick you can use to help develop the frame of mind to delegate. When you’re at work, stop thinking of yourself as ‘Emily’ (or ‘John’ or whatever your name is). Think of yourself as ‘the CEO’ (or ‘the MD’).
Then as you run through your to-do list at the start of each day, ask yourself for each item: is that a CEO job?
If you answer your own questions honestly, you’ll probably find you’re taking on a lot of non-CEO jobs that should belong to someone else.
‘I’m no good at delegating’
Many people struggle with the art of delegation.
And it’s true that delegation isn’t easy and there are many ways to do it badly. But it’s also not the hardest thing in the world either.
Learning the art of delegation requires a bit of application but it’s easy compared with some of the other challenges that entrepreneurs need to overcome.
Being poor at delegation isn’t a reason for doing everything yourself. It’s a reason for learning how to delegate effectively. That’s what we’ll talk about next.
Let’s begin by considering what you should delegate before moving on to how to do it.
What to delegate? Apply the Five Levels of Delegation
How much work and how much decision-making authority should you delegate to one of your team? The answer depends on factors particular to the project and on the level of expertise and experience of the person to whom you are delegating.
Nevertheless some well-established frameworks exist that we can use to guide our decisions. They are usually couched in terms of ‘levels of delegation’. Leading productivity author Michael Hyatt provided his version in his book Free to Focus.
Hyatt proposes five levels. Here’s a summary of the key points:
Delegate a task and specify how you’d like it done. You know what you want done and you know the best way to do it. So you just ask someone to carry out a detailed set of instructions with no authority to take any initiative themselves.
Delegate the investigation of options for how to execute a task. You don’t know the best way to achieve an objective so you ask someone to investigate the issue and report back their findings. You then take the decision about the next steps.
Delegate the investigation of options and ask for a recommendation. As above, except that you ask the person you have delegated to to provide a recommendation with supporting arguments. Note that you’ve not delegated any authority to act – that stays with you.
Delegate the investigation of options and appropriate action with an instruction to report back on completion. As above, except that this time you delegate the authority to act to the other person and just ask for them to let you know when they’ve completed the task.
Delegate responsibility for the entire project. You simply hand over all responsibility for investigating and executing the task without requiring anyone to report back to you afterwards.
Using a framework like this can help you identify opportunities to delegate that you might previously have overlooked.
It can also help you clarify in your own mind in advance exactly how much autonomy, authority and responsibility you’re delegating. And it should provide the same clarity to the person you’re delegating to, so that they understand clearly the scope of their autonomy and what they’re responsible for.
Misunderstanding between managers and subordinates regarding the scope of the authority being delegated is a common cause of failed delegation.
How to delegate well
The framework above is excellent as far as it goes. It describes a sliding scale of delegation that you can tailor to whatever task you have at hand. In doing so it clarifies what you’re delegating.
In scenarios 1 and 5, you may not need more than this. In those cases, you’re respectively delegating no responsibility and complete responsibility. This makes life simple.
But especially in cases 2 and 3, the situation is more complex. In these cases you’re delegating partial autonomy but retaining ultimate authority yourself. Splitting responsibility can give rise to misunderstanding if it’s not handled carefully.
In these cases, we need a reliable system to guide how the delegation process will work, both for us and for the person being delegated to.
Once again, many good frameworks exist that set out the art of effective delegation. In his book Extreme Productivity, renowned productivity author Robert Pozen proposes the following:
Set out the overall, high-level goals and constraints for your project clearly at the start.
Establish accurate and specific metrics that capture the project’s goals. These are the metrics by which you’ll evaluate the work of the team to which you’ve delegated. Selecting the right metrics is critical for the success of the project. Beware the law of unintended consequences — metrics often create perverse incentives or are influenced by factors you haven’t thought of.
Make the necessary resources available to your team, whether financial, personnel or other.
Monitor progress but without starving your team of the autonomy they need to do their job.
Tolerate mistakes. Staff will indeed make mistakes — it’s part of the learning process. As I mentioned above, staff may not do a job well the first time but practice makes perfect. There needs to be a first time to initiate the learning process.
If you follow these principles, you should find that your delegated projects run smoothly.
Conclusion
Learning to delegate requires some commitment but the rewards make it worthwhile. When you delegate effectively, you multiply the impact your expertise can have on the growth and development of your business.
Hyatt, M. (2019) Free to Focus. Grand Rapids MI, Baker Books. For Michael Hyatt’s profile and his various books, see his corporate website: https://fullfocus.co/.
Pozen, R. (2012) Extreme Productivity. New York NY, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. For Robert Pozen’s profile, see his biography on the website of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where is a Senior Lecturer https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/robert-c-pozen . For Bob Pozen’s various books, see: https://bobpozen.com/index.html.
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