Delegation

One of the core topics that comes up for every founder is the nature of delegation. How to delegate. When to delegate. Who to delegate to. The question is complex because it concerns and grows from a range of psychology that uniquely affects founders of growing businesses. This article is concerned with shining a spotlight on it so that you can be better aware of the issue, not just so that you can solve it, but also so that you can play with it.

The core of the issue comes down to this. As a founder of a business you have been intimately involved with the minutiae of your project not just since it’s physical inception, but even before. You understand the problem seemingly from every perspective. You don’t just understand the product or service, you do much more than live and breathe it. Oftentimes you are it.

Then, if things have gone well, things change. You are successful. That demand changes how you can allocate your time and resources. This necessarily means you need additional help to simply manage the load, both physically and mentally. This results in hiring people, using external services and products, in bringing in advisors. These very acts change the nature of your relationship with your project, or more importantly threaten that relationship.

It is the threatening that is vital. It threatens to alter your control. Your creative control. Your control of potential outcome. This is where founders are often misunderstood. From the outside it may seem that your sole motivation to avoid delegating to others is in order to protect your economic interest, but it runs much deeper than that. Badly delegated relationships risk ruining the very thing that gets you out of bed in the morning. Is it any wonder founders of business have such a hard fought reluctance to let go of the reigns, in any capacity.

This masks the problem. You can’t continue to manage all aspects of your business. Not only will you be spread very thin, but your energy, the very thing that got you to where you are, risks being depleted. Burnout becomes very real. Delegating to capable and credible helps not just lift the load, but also shares the the joy, spreads the responsibility, widens the risk. All of this creates a lattice of support that helps keep you afloat when things start to get hard. And things always start to get hard.

So how do you delegate? What really makes the path smoother. People. Good people. And processes. Good processes.

Core to all of this is trust. The reason family businesses so often have a consigliere who has been with the family for decades is because they simply can’t be replaced. To replace them would be to replace the very central structure of the business. But this is what you’re searching for. To delegate effectively you need great people. With great processes that let them breathe and thrive. One doesn’t exist without the other.

But great people in this context is specific. It means not just highly qualified people. It means people who are culturally aligned with you. Who can communicate in a fluid manner with you. Who can communicate to your team and key people in a manner that isn’t just good, but is interchangeable with (not the same as) your own. It also means people you trust. A side word on trust. People talk of earning trust. It’s much more nuanced than that. It isn’t always a factor of time. It’s much more complex than that. How many times has your gut truly trusted someone you’ve just met. How many times have red flags been raised just as you’ve met someone. You know trust. You feel trust. It’s guttural. To be able to delegate effectively and with confidence, this gut check is vital. You’re building a team of the best around you, they need to not just earn your trust, but be your trust.

A word on processes. It’s vital that your key people not just feel trusted, but understand their operating parameters. You want then to feel like they can fly within the bounds you have set, but to know the bounds you have set. Bounds are crucial because they paint the boundaries of your trust. It is the difference between successful delegation and constantly worrying that you’ve either given too much rope or too little.

Effective delegation doesn’t need endless scrutiny it needs collaborative monitoring. Monitoring not of your people, but of their interaction with the game you’ve chosen. It is supportive. It is supportive in that it helps them thrive, uniquely, alone, without your constant presence.

It’s what they say about you when you’re not there.