Delegation: You don’t have to let go . . . but you do need to understand what happens when you don’t
Think about your favorite manager. What did she do?
Did she tell you what to do with your time at work? How to schedule meetings? Give you detailed instructions on completing projects? Review your drafts and sit in on your fact-gathering meetings?
Chances are the answer is no. It’s more likely she offered feedback if you wanted it, responded constructively when you requested guidance, and weighed in on what you did well along with areas for improvement.
What was she doing? She was delegating. This is one of the hardest things for a manager – and particularly for a startup manager – to do.
Delegation Myths
As a manager, here are some thoughts on delegation that may be holding you back:
Myth #1: I can do it myself. It’s faster.
Management takes effort. Collaboration and discussion take time. It may be faster to do things yourself in the short-run. And that lets you stick with what you do well — it feels safe. But if you want to grow – leading, creating a vision for yourself and your organization, building new working relationships – you don’t have a choice. You have to delegate.
If you don’t, you’ll stay where you are today – the comfortable, easy work you have mastered. That won’t get you to move forward. Instead, you have to be uncomfortable, and letting go can be hard.
Myth #2: It’s hard to find good people and it takes time to train them.
Or does it? Yes, it is hard to find good people. But don’t you want someone who is drawn to the chance to work with independence and autonomy?
Ideally, you bring in people who complement you and who want to accomplish great things. Attitude and aptitude often count far more than experience. Find someone hungry to learn and give them free rein.
Look out for pattern-matching – that is, favoring team members who fit an existing mold and who are like you. A clone of you can be the opposite of what you want when you delegate. Whose interests, skills and personality complement yours? That’s a key step in building an organization where you’ll create opportunity for your team, and, most of all, for yourself.
Myth #3: Nobody knows how to do things right. Other people make mistakes that I have to clean up.
Is your perfectionism keeping you from delegating? Do you get frustrated because you see others’ mistakes and missteps? Are they really mistakes, or is it just someone doing things differently than you would?
If you don’t allow for mistakes, you’re keeping your staff from learning. Think back on how you gained experience. Did you always get it right from the start? Or did you have the gift of opportunities to make mistakes and learn from them?
And by the way, you’re probably right: Things won’t get done the way you would handle them, and others may not do as good a job as you would. That may be the price you have to pay to free up mental space to focus on the future.
Startups: Delegation is Non-Optional
If you are a startup founder, it can be particularly hard to delegate. You’ve built the company from nothing, so it’s hard to let go. In the beginning, the founder is everything — the face of the company internally and externally, and sometimes the only employee and thus the embodiment of the organization in the eyes of investors, mentors and customers. Doing all of the work yourself keeps you in the past. Evolving and growing requires delegation. Learning how to share work is key to keeping the organization afloat and growing. Things change so quickly that founders are quickly overloaded and reach capacity unless they learn to delegate. It’s non-optional. And it’s hard.
The Perils of Perfection
Nobody says you have to delegate. It’s fine if you decide you don’t want to. But be sure to recognize that that will prevent you from building an organization and developing yourself. You need to nurture talent – the people who can learn to do what you’re doing today so you can move onto bigger and better things.
Advice on how to turn things over to others:
Recognize your weaknesses and things you don’t like to do. Consider delegating those first. That could be a good start.
For the most immediate results, farm out the most powerful drivers of your business’s growth and profitability. At a high-growth company, sales may be a logical place to begin to beef up staffing. If your organization is undergoing a strategic shift, figure out who has a passion for the new direction and new projects and delegate that to him.
Get specific feedback on yourself as a delegator. What is it like for colleagues and direct reports to work with you? Where are you controlling and where should you let go? Are you nurturing and encouraging the next generation of talent, knowing there will be stumbles along the way? Or are you hoarding work, preventing yourself and your organization from growing? You don’t know until you ask.
Do you believe it’s important to know not just your weaknesses, but also those of your colleagues? If yes, consider this: You can’t figure out peoples’ weaknesses without seeing where they fail. What if you viewed your reluctance to delegate as an unhealthy form of self-focus. By doing it all, you’re cementing blindspots about what you think you do well and about others’ potential. You could be wrong.
Face the risk of failure. Will things go wrong when you let others find their way? Probably. But that’s kind of like asking if things might go wrong if you step outside your house today. Probably. Observe what comes up for you when you swoop in. Are you trying to prove that you are useful? Or that you can outwork others? Are you buffering yourself against the next new challenge for yourself or your business? And by just doing it yourself, what price are you paying in lost focus or distraction?
Avoiding delegation is a form of lack of trust. If I don’t let you chart your own course, we’re not building an honest, trusting relationship that will energize us instead of keeping us stuck in the past. The ultimate form of trust is allowing your colleagues to stumble — to figure things out for themselves — and to learn from the experience.
You can’t learn and grow without things being hard. Delegation is one of those hard things, but it’s worth it in the end.
Delegation will help to uncover areas of opportunity for improvement for you and for others. A failure to do so means focusing on your past, and preventing you and your colleagues from creating new directions. You can choose to hold onto what you’re doing knowing things will be handled as you think best. But you won’t see whether that really is the best way. And you will definitely not grow as a person or as an organization without delegating.