If you aren’t sure whether or when to delegate, you’re not alone. It’s one of the main things my clients often have trouble with. People often fear delegating. They worry about things such as others not doing the task well, or that delegating somehow implies they can’t pull their weight.
But, when used strategically, delegation can support the goals of the entire organization. I recently encountered a situation with one of my clients that illustrates this perfectly.
Darcy (not her real name) is a founder and CEO of a small sales-based company with a staff of six, including herself. During one of our sessions, she brought up several conflicting, yet important, projects:
Darcy struggled to do all of this within her packed schedule. She was feeling burnt out. She was also dealing with low team morale and high turnover, and she feared assigning more to anyone might make them decide to leave, forcing her to start over again.
Shift your mindset away from fear
Darcy’s fear wasn’t serving her or her team. Instead, she needed to focus on maximizing everyone’s output and effectiveness—to get into what I call the Zone of Extraordinary Achievement.
Within the Zone of Extraordinary Achievement, the entire team reaches a new level of productivity and enjoyment of work through better alignment. With this focus in mind, answering these four important questions will help decide how to approach goals:
Does this task move the organization’s and my own priorities forward?
We often get into the routine of doing busywork because we’ve always done it. But sometimes, we need to stop and examine whether it still needs to be done. It may have made sense four years ago, when we didn’t have today’s software. It may have supported our previous organizational priorities. But does it make sense today?
Darcy’s four tasks definitely moved the company forward, so they all met that test. Now we needed to decide who should do them.
Does this task suck the life out of me, or does it give me energy?
Everyone has to do things they don’t love. However, when you do too many at once, or for the bulk of your day, you lose energy and burn out. The opposite occurs when you do what you love—you gain energy.
Darcy gets fired up from working with people. She loves sales, which she sees as helping clients solve their problems. She’s excited about creating the new process and also about training the team members. She enjoys most aspects of performance reviews, though she dislikes giving criticism. However, she secretly hates budget reviews. She’d rather be generating more numbers than crunching them.
Am I good at this task?
This answer often correlates with the answers to the second question because you are likely good at what you love doing, and vice versa. With her people skills, Darcy was brilliant at creating people-centered processes, training, and coaching performance. Budgeting, however, took her longer than it might take others.
Can only I do this, or can someone else do it?
This is the tricky one. Darcy at first believed only she could do all of these. But we soon determined that wasn’t true.
She knew the most about the company processes and had deep experience selling all the company’s products. But though her two new sales reps weren’t yet familiar with all the company’s products, all three were experienced in sales. They could create the prospect follow-up process, especially after they were trained. By creating the process, they’d have more buy-in with following it, and helping create it would make them feel valued, not to mention allow them to get to know their customers in more depth.
Darcy assumed she couldn’t afford to outsource the training. But, after looking at the projected numbers, she realized she was stuck in the mindset she’d had when her company was smaller. Now, she couldn’t afford not to outsource. When they had time, she and her other sales rep had been slowly training the new reps, which meant after four months, the reps still could only sell some products. She wasn’t saving money by outsourcing the training; she was losing potential revenue! The outsourced training would pay for itself in two months if they had average sales.
She couldn’t delegate the performance reviews because the entire staff reported to her. But should they? It was time to promote her more experienced rep to a sales-management position. He could take the new reps’ reviews off of Darcy’s plate next quarter.
Meanwhile, she could outsource the budget report compilation tasks to her accountant, who was obviously great with numbers, and then ask her manager-in-training to help analyze the reports and make recommendations as part of his new role. Another win-win.
Darcy now had only 1.5 projects on her plate and a way to develop her team without giving up any goals.
Without smart delegation, your organization can’t scale and achieve more, and frustrated employees who want to grow and learn will seek opportunities elsewhere.
Meanwhile, you’ll keep employees who don’t want to grow or be challenged, creating a stagnant, deteriorating situation. If you aren’t delegating because you fear someone won’t perform well or isn’t interested, maybe you need to look at whether they should be working for you.
To achieve extraordinary things, everyone’s strengths and personal goals need to align wherever possible with those of the organization. If they aren’t right for yours, they owe it to themselves to find a better fit elsewhere.
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