Delegation Series: What Nobody Else Will Tell You About Delegation
How “Task-Hoarding” Is Keeping You Stuck
Here's the thing about delegation… everyone just seems to throw the word around like it's something we were taught in school like sight words and multiplication tables. The truth is delegation is very high on the “skills I need to succeed” but it's criminally low in the “things I know how to do” list for more business leaders. It's costing you way, way more time and money than you think doing everything yourself. When you stay in the Doing work instead of delegating tasks to the right person for the job you create your own growth and profit bottlenecks.
Here’s a pretty clear example of this in the wild:
Michael Shreeve of the No Pants Project worked with us to learn how to delegate smarter. After just 6 months of work, he saw a 3x increase in revenue and profits while working nearly 90% less time.
The hidden costs of doing it all yourself
It’s easy to overlook the hidden cost of hoarding all the tasks when the obvious cost of hiring and training someone is staring you in the face. And we're never one to say that hiring that will solve all your problems. But holding everything yourself is also not solving all of your problems.It's limiting your growth and creating a really small income ceiling for yourself.
You need to learn the skill of delegation.
This is definitely not something that you are born with.I used to be a pastry chef and I was absolutely horrible at delegating. I always made a lot of assumptions about people's level of general knowledge and didn't fully understand how important it is to invest time in creating the systems and training tools upfront to save yourself time down the road. I recently shared a recipe with a team member, and all it had on it was a basic list of ingredients and four lines of instructions.In my mind, I understood how to read it because it was my recipe, but when I handed it to someone who'd never done it before it became very clear that they absolutely could not follow it. It's a skill to break down the steps and reverse engineer the process to get to the desired outcome.
Delegation is a skill you need to grow your business
Most people assume they're delegatingReally they are just trapping themselves in a deciding loop. Constantly answering questions because the other person doesn’t have all of the information needed to complete the task. What you need to communicate when you delegate
All background information
Relevant permissions
The outcome they are responsible for
Access to the right tools and resources
There will be trial and error, but the phrase “it's just easier if I do it all myself” does not need to be part of your vocabulary. This skill is an essential part of growing your business and regaining some of your own personal freedoms. Whether it's you, your managers, your team leads, or coworkers, this skill needs to be mastered by everyone on your team so you can grow efficiently.