DELEGATION 1

No One Can Do This Like I Would

The single social media questions I hear most is:

How do I find time do it all?

I usually answer, “You can’t and I don’t think you’d want to, even if you could.”

We all can only do what’s humanly possible.
We all get the same 24 hours in the same day.

So what’s the best way to get things done in the time that we have?

How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

Communication might be easier, even quicker through technology, but more people further apart take longer to communicate with. Take, for example, a simple request for information. One message might get to 20 friends, but not all of them will get and respond to that message at the same time in the same way. Not all of them will respond completely. Some will not respond at all. Some will misread or not read the directions and send information that doesn’t help.

Time is an unrenewable resource. We can’t make more. So how do we make the best use of the time that we have?

• Analyze the work you do to find your high impact value and core compentencies. Why do people hire you? What do you do that makes the most difference? Isolate those tasks and skills. No one is expert at every step of the process. Decide which steps are where you add the highest value. Is it planning, service, execution, design, management, writing, administration? Choose no more than two.
• Identify the skills and tasks that you do least efficiently — those that you like least, those that you don’t do well, those that anyone can do.
• Change the way you work to offer those tasks to someone who does them better than you do.

That’s right, the way to offer more of our best work is to delegate. It’s easy to think that no one would do it like we would. And it’s probably true.

But different isn’t the same as wrong and sometimes different is better.

The trick is knowing what to delegate and knowing that we don’t have to delegate the WHOLE task. We can delegate chunks.

Start with the obvious stuff. Let fresh eyes read your work for errors. Ask another person to key in the changes. Those are tasks that are easily isolated and executed by someone who’s probably more proficient at them than we are. We can check the final before it goes out.

When we pass on the tasks that we don’t like, don’t do well, and don’t need to do, we can put the best of our time where it makes the most difference — doing what only we can do.

How so you offer more of your best work when you’re scaling up?

Part 2 tomorrow … Delegation 2: I Can’t Let Someone Else Do That!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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