THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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My Delegate and Elevate Tool™

Delegation is difficult.

As an entrepreneur who works full-time helping other entrepreneurs build better businesses, I can tell you first hand that it’s difficult for almost everyone.

Very few people are naturals at it, and in fact it’s so hard it’s a primary cause of most businesses failing to succeed in the long-term.

Delegation, in it’s simplest form, is having your tasks taken care of for you so you don’t have to do them anymore. Passing those tasks to other humans is what is primarily discussed about the topic, but there are actually four ways to delegate:

1. Eliminate

2. Simplify

3. Automate

4. Delegate to another person

 Because passing to another person can be the most complicated, and expensive, it’s the 4^th of those four options. It’s also inevitable and required if you want any kind of meaningful growth in a business, organization, or life in general.

Delegating to people is difficult and often scary. We’ve all gotten burned by improperly delegating to someone and seeing things done poorly. Or putting in tons of work to properly delegate tasks, and still seen things go wrong. It also requires substantial amounts of work to delegate properly, so we have to undergo substantial short-term pain to be successful. With already busy schedules and lives, that short-term pain can feel a little too much sometimes.

I’ve been delegating to people for my whole career, and it’s still challenging for me. I haven’t found a way to avoid it either.

I run a solo business where I advise other entrepreneurs and their teams, and even that business requires delegation to multiple people to function optimally. Since starting this stage of my journey a year ago, I’ve been slowly delegating tasks to an assistant with mix results.

Generally speaking it’s felt like two steps forward, one step back. But with commitment, consistency, and a lot of work, it’s moving in the right direction.

After an initial period where most of the work was tied to a specific series of tasks, I recently began delegating higher level tasks, which has a required a higher level of detail and using a tool I teach regularly to my clients – The Delegate and Elevate Tool 

I wanted to share that process, I hope it’s helpful.

Using The Delegate and Elevate Tool is simple, but requires diligence and follow-through to delegate many things. Here’s the process:

1. List out all the things you work on in a given week

2. Categorize them into 4 categories:

   • Love and are great at (top left)

   • Like and are good at (top right)

   • Don’t like and are good at (bottom left)

   • Don’t like and are bad at (bottom right)

3. Delegate things in bottom right as soon as possible, then bottom left, and ultimately in the top right as you move closer and closer to only doing things in the top left

I told you it was simple, right? It’s also easier said than done. If you update it every month or quarter, and put in the work to follow the process though, it can be life changing.

I did this with my assistant, here is my matrix:

The tricky part I realized in this situation though, is that in order to properly delegate tasks to one person, I had to ensure he could do a good job. So in addition to just listing them out and communicating them to him, I asked him to rank order the tasks he wanted to take on based on his interests and desires.

Knowing I want to delegate my emails is simple – doing it with someone who has no interest or capacity to take them on is a recipe for disaster. Having an open and honest discussion was critical here – it was possible that I’d need to keep him on only for certain tasks, and delegate others to another person with different interests.

Once I got commitment that he wanted to take on these tasks, we then prioritized them and came up with a plan to delegate them. That plan is as simple as follows:

1. Selecting which tasks would be delegated in the next period

2. Selecting a timeline for completion

3. Agreeing on what completion looks like

This process is iterative and requires consistent check-ins, feedback, and communication.

Acknowledging that it’s difficult to do this Is important. Otherwise we’re setup for frustration and failure. Once we do that, we can then move onto accepting it’s necessity if we want to achieve our goals. Once finally accepted, we can ultimately move to the phase of enjoying the process, because it’s part of the journey.

I’ve had my share of frustration and failure with delegation throughout my career. I’ve accepted it’s required in my work, home life, family life, everywhere. Instead of complaining about it, I’ll always lean into it.

In the case of my assistant – success looks like a year from now I’m removed from my emails, calendar scheduling, bookkeeping, and many other administrative tasks that currently take up my time and energy, and keep me from my unique ability – helping other entrepreneurs build better businesses and better lives.

I hope this simple tool will help you in some area that you need to delegate. If you know you need to do it – lean in and do it right.

I’ll talk to you next week,

Mike

Thanks for reading The Lifestyle Entrepreneur

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