By Bryan Miles, Co-Founder of BELAY
Every leader I know (including me!) can wrestle with delegation. It’s one of the best things a leader can do… and it’s one of the hardest.
I’ve watched leaders both procrastinate and embrace delegation. The ones who embrace delegation are amazed and shocked by the positive results. The ones who procrastinate delegation continue to be their organization’s bottleneck.
Leaders- you are not your cheapest resource! Just because you can handle everything doesn’t mean you should.
One of my favorite in-house case studies is from Kenny Jahng, owner of the boutique digital agency Big Click Syndicate. Jahng is an expert in helping cause-related nonprofits, churches and denominations with strategic marketing. We started working with him a few years ago when we hired a virtual executive assistant.
Jahng found it difficult to grow his business because he was caught up in day-to-day activities like booking meetings, booking travel and following up on small customer service requests. He was left with little time to concentrate on what really mattered to him.
When he delegated several of his maintenance and administrative tasks to his VEA, everything changed. “If you’re going to build something that’s going to scale at some point you really have to let go, let go, let go. So that’s been an ongoing thing for me.”
Delegation is necessary to scale your business. In Jahng’s case, delegation moved his daily goals from maintenance mode to growth mode. That’s the beauty of delegation - it moves us from task to vision!
You’ve heard me say before that we have to cast vision over and over and over again. It’s one of the best things we can do for our people. And that kind of vision casting can’t happen if we’re caught up in the day-to-day.
Effective leaders must embrace delegation. Trust me - our organizations become more agile, more productive, more responsive, more creative and more efficient because of it.
What can you delegate today? Let’s go!
Thoughts? Let me know on Twitter - @bryanmiles