Delegation Needed For Growth

As entrepreneurs we need to pay attention to the details that matter but to achieve even modest growth or scaling we also need to use delegation. We need to allow other team members to contribute their own strengths, experiences, and insights to the project at hand.

At a Recent Mastermind We Discussed Delegation 

At a recent mastermind we talked about delegation, an essential part of being a leader. We wanted to become more effective at delegation in order to:

• Achieve more
• Save time
• Spend time of the important things
• Become more flexible
• Retain good team members

Homework Before Our Mastermind Meeting

We agreed to watch a good video by Lisa Montanaro on delegation: “Let Go To Grow: Mastering the Art of Delegation.”

Her presentation is full of practical advise, but some people felt it was a little long at about an hour running time.  One take away I especially liked was the idea of keeping project and delegation logs.

Here were a couple of our roundtable questions during the meeting:

• What are three things that you delegate/ outsource now?
• When do you delegate?
• What do you delegate?
• Do you provide checklist/examples/templates?
• How do you measure the deliverable?
• Who do you outsource to?
• Tell about one thing you learned the hard way.

Our discussion  provided tips on:

• What to tasks to delegate
• Ways to manage and even shorten the overhead that sometimes occurs when delegating tasks
• How to delegate based on skill level of the person and the impact on our time and how much direction and check in was required
• Effective ways develop templates, examples and checklist to make delegation smoother for all involved

“Never tell people how to do things.
Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
George Patton

Interested in a Mastermind Group?

We do have a few openings in our Silicon Valley groups so please contact us.

Related Blog Posts

• SKMurphy Newsletter Archive
• Podcast with Pete Tormey: Bootstrapper’s Delegation Checklist
• The Business is Everyone’s Business
• The Business is Everyone’s Business (Part 2)
• Use Wikis For Team Projects
• Tony Schwartz’s Principles For Fiercely Complex Times
  “One of the entrepreneur’s balancing acts is control vs. creative delegation. A commitment to taking personal responsibility and controlling your destiny is essential to getting a startup off the ground. But later on, growth requires effective delegation, which entails a risk of the loss of control.  We talk to entrepreneurs who say they want to grow, but as the conversation progresses it’s clear that they only want to grow their business to the point that they remain in complete control.  Control is essential to get started.  But it has to be complemented with an ability to trust–business partners, customers, employees, suppliers, and channel partners—or you can only grow the business to  a certain size.”