This week, I was a guest on The SEO Mindset Podcast with Tazmin Suleman and we discussed a topic that is probably interesting to a number of you – how to respond when one of your team members resigns.
I also wrote about this topic a few weeks ago if you’d prefer to read rather than listen!
Now, onto this week’s newsletter. And it’s another one where we’re going to dive into a question from a reader who sent me this challenge:
At times, I get caught in the mindset of “this is just easier for me to do” vs. taking the time to transition the opportunity (which unfortunately and unintentionally is stunting all of our personal and collective growth). It’s not an issue of me letting things go, it’s more how to slow down enough in the day-to-day to pass on work that could grow my team — if that makes sense?
This is such a common place for managers to be – where it’s hard to delegate because it just feels easier and quicker to do the job yourself. As the reader describes, this is problematic because it holds everyone back from their development.
The problem is, the challenge is hard to solve because it’s actually true. Quite often, it actually is quicker and easier to do the job yourself! So we rationalise it very quickly and convince ourselves that we’re doing the right thing by not delegating a task.
To overcome this challenge, you need to understand the reality that many of us have to deal with every day – the whirlwind.
The whirlwind and its effect on you
The whirlwind is a concept that I first came across in a book called The Four Disciplines of Execution. It’s defined as:
The whirlwind is all the urgent activities that are necessary to. sustain your business day-to-day Leaders seldom differentiate. between the whirlwind and strategic goals because both are. necessary to the survival of the organization.
Essentially, the whirlwind can prevent us from looking at (and working on) the bigger picture because we’re too focused on keeping the wheels turning.
In the context of delegation, our logical minds may well tell us that delegation is a good thing and that it’ll help us in the long term. But the whirlwind means that we can’t think about the long term right now – we have too much to do and too much to get done, so we focus on the short term and just do it ourselves.
The whirlwind is particularly prevalent in agencies, given that the business model means that an individual can be pulled in any number of directions at any given time thanks to working with a bunch of clients. But it can pop up in any busy or fast paced workplace.
Now, you can’t stop the whirlwind from happening.
Remember, the whirlwind isn’t about tasks that aren’t important. Quite the opposite, the tasks are required to keep the business running smoothly, so you can’t just stop doing them.
So the first step is to be aware of it and the second step is to account for it. Accounting for it means that you adapt how you work so that you can carve out ways to still work on bigger picture projects, whilst getting the day-to-day stuff done.
In the context of delegation, let’s explore a few tactical ways that you can do that.
Look for repeatable tasks and projects to delegate
If we remember that a key blocker to delegation is the fact that we feel like we don’t have the time to do it, then we should try and be as efficient as possible when we do delegate.
One way to do this is to look for tasks and projects that come up over and over again and try to delegate these first. The fact that they are repeatable and come up a lot means that over time, you become more efficient at delegation of them, meaning that you don’t need as much time to delegate as other tasks.
You can also take the opportunity to think of a brief as a template which can be reused in the future and changed to suit the task. So with each task that you delegate and each brief that you write, try to think about how you can structure it so that you can reuse it in the future.
With the more tasks that you delegate, the more that your file of briefing templates will build up over time and make delegation far more efficient.
This means that when you do need to delegate something, you’ll be far quicker at it and the whirlwind is less likely to take over.
Utilise one-on-ones for delegation
Try using one-on-one time to talk about tasks and take the opportunity to brief an individual on a task that you’d like help with. If you do weekly or bi-weekly catch ups with your team to discuss their workloads/day-to-day stuff, this can work quite well.
You can take some of this time to discuss a task or project that you’d like them to take on and make efficient use of the time that you already had planned or booked anyway. You don’t want to dominate the whole meeting with this, but if you’re struggling for time, this is a good opportunity to be more efficient with the time that you do have.
Break big tasks or projects down into smaller chunks
Another big reason why we don’t delegate is that the thing we want to delegate feels too big and therefore, will take too long to delegate anyway. Again, this can lead to us keeping hold of it because it feels more efficient to do so.
An effective way to get around this is to break down a big project or task into small parts. If possible, try to distil down a task into the smallest possible, but meaningful task that won’t take too long to delegate. This may be tricky, but it’s all about finding the simplest form of what you want someone to do and therefore, it being simple to handover and take on. It may take longer overall to get through the task, but you can delegate it bit by bit rather than keeping it all yourself.
