How much of what your company does absolutely MUST be done by you? How many hours a week do you spend doing those things? What if you could do 10-20 more hours of that per month. After a few months, what if you refined that new ability three or four times? Think hard about that. At that point, you would be able to spend 10-20 hours more per week on the things you and only you must do. How would that change your business? For that matter, how would it change your life? I learned this magic from a mentor who is pretty demanding about getting people to work on the things they’re best at – and nothing else. While not everyone can do that right off the bat, this process still leaves plenty of opportunity to gain valuable time to do the work no one else can do.
Think who, not how
Perfecting the art of delegation (or at least refining it) is something that takes time. Identifying everything you do that can be done by others… doesn’t. If that seems tough, just identify the few things you do that no one, absolutely no one, can do for you. Now it’s easy: delegate everything else.
Yep, that simple. Start with the easy stuff.
Say you want to send flowers to your mom for her birthday. You can call the florist in the town where she lives and work it out with them. You can call 1-800 whatever. You can call a local florist and ask them to make it happen. Or you can do none of that – and delegate the task to someone with as much or little detail as you like. Your mom doesn’t care that you didn’t make the phone call. She’s happy you remembered her and thought enough to send flowers.
You might be thinking “that was only 10 minutes on the phone”. Or 15. Or 20. Plus following up, if needed. Whatever. The time for this one task isn’t all that relevant. Look at the big picture and add them up. The point isn’t how much this one task takes. It’s about how many tasks like this are consuming your time each month.
Turn it up by turning it around
Once you start getting into the groove of delegating, it’ll get easier over time. Thing is, there’s a way to completely rethink the process and realign how you look at new projects. When a new task or project pops up, think first about who else (ie: not you) can do the work – unless the work is on that (probably) short list of things that only you can do. Who else can manage it? Plan it? Track it? Lots of people, right? Let someone else do those things. They’re important, but that doesn’t mean someone else can’t do them. You focus on the portion of the project that’s work for you – and nothing else.
Multiplying the impact
Want to take this a bit further and multiply the impact? Start teaching it to your managers and skilled team members who get distracted / side-tracked by work that someone else could do. You might be wondering “If everyone is delegating this work, won’t that require more people?” Yes, it might.
Thing is, if your managers and highly-skilled team members are doing enough of this work that it requires one or more people to complete it, that’s a problem. It means that your managers aren’t spending all of their time managing (hard to imagine, right?) Instead, they’re doing work that someone else can do. It also means your highly-skilled team members are spending an inordinate amount of time on things that other team members can do.
For managers, the problem is that when people, projects, relationships, and product delivery isn’t managed well, the entire company is affected. In the case of highly-skilled team members, we’re talking about high value, high cost, high return on investment work. Any time your highly-skilled team members are spending time on other tasks, they’re getting more expensive by the minute. Worse yet, they become more expensive when they spend time on random tasks that have nothing to do with their skill. Removing any non-core task from these folks increases their value and allows them to contribute more to the company’s bottom line. In some cases, this newly found time opens up sales opportunities because these folks can produce more of the thing you hired them to do.
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