The 4 reasons that counter ANY argument/excuse you have for not delegating to your team... Transcript:
Hi there, everybody. Cameron Morrissey here. I've got a really important topic today because it's an obstacle almost all leaders face. That is a resistance to delegation. I wanted to cover the reasons why you must delegate as a leader if you want to be effective and if you want to move up the career ladder. Now some of the most common complaints and excuses for not delegating are that it takes too much time. It's easier for me to just do it myself than it is for me to teach somebody how to do it. Or they're worried about infringing upon the other person and their sensibilities, like I'm sloughing off all of my work to that person. Or possibly that you're delegate yourself out of the job, that you're going to lose that power. I wanted to cover four main reasons why you have to delegate. All of these reasons address each of those main concerns with delegation. The first reason that I want to talk about is that you need to delegate to get more done. You simply can't get everything off of your plate. It's impossible in today's day and age. Even if you got through your to-do list, there'd be more stuff that would just magically come onto it as you got done with those tasks. If you want to get more stuff done, you're going to have to move those items off of your plate and have you team and disperse those amongst the team. It's easier to carry a weight when you have a team carrying it as opposed to you carrying it individually. That's the first thing. The second reason that leaders have to delegate is to get more important stuff done. It's not just that you're moving stuff off of your plate and onto others who can help you out with these things. It's that you're moving the lower priority work so that you can focus on the bigger items. How many times have we come into work every day and we've got three big things that we want to accomplish? We go through our day and we're driving home. We go, "Wait a second. I didn't accomplish anything that I wanted to do today." That's because the day to day minutiae gets in the way of getting the important stuff done. You have to protect the urgent from the important. The way that you do that is you train your staff to be able to handle delegated tasks so that you can get to that important work. The third thing is that delegation develops your team. If you aren't developing the skillset of your team, then you're not enriching their work habits and you're not improving their overall productivity and value to the company. That's something that's absolutely essential. If you're worried about people being concerned that you're delegating stuff to them and that you're just sloughing off duties, you'd be surprised how many people will welcome those duties and how much of a motivating factor it is for people to learn and to grow and to be entrusted with things. That's what you need to focus on. Delegating tasks is a way that you can develop the skillsets of your team and make them more valuable to the organization itself. The fourth reason is actually just as a contingency. I call it the hit by the bus scenario. If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, would the operation be able to continue on without you there? This happens when you go on vacation. Are there duties that simply wait until you get back? That's something that doesn't help the operation. It is a responsibility for you to actually handle those things by delegating them out and having a contingency so that somebody else can do those. By the way, that's a key to all delegation. You don't necessarily delegate something off all the time. It can be that you only delegate it when you really need help with something. Monthly reports, you're caught up in a couple of different things. Have somebody else be able to help you out. You do them 10 or 11 months out of the year, but a couple of times maybe you have somebody help you out. That's how you stay focused on the important things. Those are the four main reasons that you want to delegate. If it takes too much time, realize that it's in developing teams that you're actually spending time to focus on more important things. If you're worried about sloughing off your duties and what people are going to think of that, that's development. If you're worried about losing your power, delegating the lower priority items so that you can work on the more important things is something that actually increases your power, doesn't decrease it. Thanks so much, everybody. You have a great day.
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