The #1 Delegation Mistake Small Business Owners Make

And how to overcome it.

Anyone who has ever tried to scale a business has heard this advice:

"You have to delegate. If you're the only one doing ___ , you don't have a business."

This "___" could be sales. It could be marketing. It could be service delivery.

And the advice is true: a business that is built on ONE person's ability to do something will inherently be constrained by that one person's capacity.

But, if you've ever taken this advice…

I'm guessing this is also true in your experience:

You decide to delegate the KEY thing taking most of your time…

So you spend the big bucks and hire a "great person"...

Only to have your head in your hands a couple of months in.

"This is going worse than ever. And we're making less money!"

"My goodness. I knew I was the only one who could do it."

Feeling this way, it's possible that you even ripped off the band-aid…

And let your new hire know that you'd be taking back the process, so they need to find a different job.

THE KEY MISTAKE: if you've been here, the key mistake for you was not that you delegated, it was that you too quickly delegated 100% of the job.

For any given workflow, certain parts are much higher leverage than others.

Some examples:

- In the world of sales, one great email template can carry a team of SDRs for months.

- In the world of operations, one amazing daily stand-up meeting can make a huge difference in aligning a team of 30 people throughout the day

- In the world of accounting, a monthly P&L review can be the critical rhythm that protects us from getting (financially) over our skis.

The other 90% of these functions might be able to be delegated with relative ease…

But without this critical 10% done well, all this other effort will be significantly limited in terms of output.

JOHN MAXWELL'S 10-80-10 RULE:

Leadership guru John Maxwell talks about a 10-80-10 Principle.

His advice is that a leader should definitely get involved in the first 10% and last 10% of projects…

As he explains in his book Thinking for a Change: "I practice the 10-80-10 principle with the people to whom I'm delegating a task. I help with the first 10 percent by casting vision, laying down parameters, providing resources, and giving encouragement. Then once they've done the middle 80 percent, I come alongside them again and help them take whatever it is the rest of the way, if I can. I call it putting the cherry on top."

I might adapt this slightly to push each of us to figure out where the crucial one or two points of real leverage are… even if these might be in the middle of the workflow.

By retaining control of these leverage points, a bunch of good things happen:

1) We keep results humming

One of the biggest reasons that delegation fails is that the delegating leader gets impatient, especially if they are worried about short-term results.

By continuing to perform the critical drivers of the process ourselves, we'll do our part to maintain immediate results.

2) We take the pressure off of the person we're delegating to.

Yes, this person will still need to take accountability for their productivity on the "simpler" stuff.

But we won't be expecting them to nail the hardest part of the process first.

3) We create healthy accountability because of our continued presence (even if less frequent).

When people know a leader is watching, they try harder.

This is just the way humans are wired.

4) We stay connected enough to the process that we can make decisions around it.

It's very hard as a leader to make great decisions on something that we don't understand.

By staying involved even 10% of the time, we'll be close enough to the details to make informed higher-level decisions.

5) We avoid an "all or nothing" view of delegation.

Back to the above example, it's tempting to think that delegation is either "working" or "not working."

But, the reality is that we can't think about this at a function, or even a workflow level.

We need to look at each component of a process to understand how delegation is going. Staying involved reminds us of this.

CONCLUSION:

Ultimately, if you are able to successfully delegate the first 80% of a workflow…

You may decide in the future that it's time to offload the remaining 20%.

But don't start with 100%.

Delegation goes better when you continue doing the hardest 20% for your team…

At least short-term.