how to be a better delegator

Summary

Jerred discusses the importance of effective delegation for business growth, drawing from his experience as a military officer and entrepreneur. He introduces a delegation matrix with four quadrants to help decide which tasks to delegate based on their value and uniqueness. Jerred emphasizes the significance of understanding the “why” behind tasks and provides a list of do’s and don’ts for successful delegation, aiming to empower teams and maintain high standards.

Key takeaways:

• Use the delegation matrix to categorize tasks into four quadrants: unique and high value, unique and low value, general and high value, and general and low value, to determine which tasks to delegate.
• Always explain the “why” behind tasks to ensure team members are motivated and understand the importance of their work.
• Do not neglect training and setting standards; proper onboarding and clear expectations are crucial for effective delegation.
• Avoid starting with high-value tasks when delegating; build trust and competence with lower-value tasks first.
• Empower your team by providing autonomy, resources, and a clear growth plan to foster personal and professional development.
• Regularly follow up and provide specific feedback, including praise, to reinforce good performance and encourage continuous improvement.

Transcript

why your business won’t grow without delegation

If you can’t figure out how to delegate effectively, your business will not grow. Look, I spent 10 years as a military officer, over 10 years now as an entrepreneur, been leading teams and people throughout the last two decades. Today I’m gonna go over a delegation matrix to help you make decisions and kind of put your head in the right space for being able to delegate effectively.

Then I’m gonna go over the most common do’s and don’ts. So you gotta be thinking about delegation in kind of four quadrants. The first quadrant is going to be a unique skill that is of high value. So let’s go to an example of creating content, the content I’m creating right now. It is a high value part of my time, and it is a unique skill.

the delegation matrix explained

I couldn’t delegate doing this to someone else on my team. If they’re creating content for me, why wouldn’t they just go do it themselves? So this is very unique to me, and it is also high value. So immediately, if it’s unique and high value, that’s gonna stay with me for the longest period of time.

So if it’s unique and high value, you wanna hold onto those tasks as long as you can. It’s not that you’ll never delegate them, but those are the ones you want to keep. Now you might have a unique skill that is low value. That would be the next quadrant down. So if you have a unique skill that is low value, you have to decide.

unique & high-value tasks

You have to decide if this is something that could be delegated. So another for instance example here is, I’m pretty good at graphic design. I’m pretty good at creating graphics for social media posts, PDFs, all these kind of things. I just have the design eye. I’m good in Photoshop, I’m good in Canva, all of these kind of things.

It is a very unique skill because I have tried to delegate it to other people, and sometimes they’re just not as good at it. But it is low value ultimately. And I’ve tested this multiple times. I’m like, okay, if I spend two hours doing this and you spend, you know, whatever, three or four hours doing it, does it turn out any better?

unique but low-value tasks

Ultimately the value isn’t any higher if someone does slightly less quality than me, but it still gets done. It’s a unique skill, I have it, but it’s low value, so I’m still going to delegate it in my case. Some people might wanna hold on to that. I’m not of the mindset that you should get rid of everything and delegate everything.

If there are things that you actually enjoy, like if I truly enjoyed making graphics and I just wanted to do it, I could decide to do that. So that’s where the decision point comes in. Now we move over to general skill and high value. This is another decision point. So if you have a general skill that is high value, you again have to make this decision of, okay, is this something I wanna let go, or is this something that I could ultimately delegate to my team?

So an example of a general skill that is also high value, this could be email marketing, or scheduling social media posts, and making sure that those things get done. Now the reason I say they’re general skills is because they can be trained. Like if I have all the social media content that I’ve created, it’s a general skill, anybody can do it, but it has to get done.

general & high-value tasks

Same with email marketing, it has to get done. It cannot not get done. And so it’s an extremely high value to make sure content’s going out, email newsletter stuff is going out. It’s a general skill though, the scheduling of those things, but it’s very high value. So again, I’m at the decision point.

Does a value decrease any less if I have someone schedule these things out and put together kind of the content strategy and framework? Not necessarily. It’s a generalized skill, but it is high value, so I can decide if I wanna let that one go. In this case, if we’re talking about making sure email marketing happens, if I’ve trained the team on how to do that effectively, and I have that more generalized skill, I’m gonna go ahead and decide to delegate that one out, even though I’ll give them a ton of guidance.

general & low-value tasks

And I’ll go over that and my do’s and don’ts here in a second. Now the place where you land, where you pretty much are always going to delegate, is the bottom quadrant, which is when you have a general skill that is low value. You can think like scheduling meetings, or scheduling administrative work, or anything kind of like that.

It’s a general skill. Almost anybody could be taught to do this skill. And it’s not of the highest value. Now when I say low value, it doesn’t mean it’s not an important task. And that’s something you don’t necessarily wanna say to your team. You don’t wanna say, hey, I’m giving you a low value task.

It’s a general skill. Anybody can do it. Because that’s not what I mean necessarily. But as a business owner, you should be focused on the most high value tasks that take your time, specifically your unique skill set, to grow the business. So when you have a team member who’s doing a general skill that’s low value, and it’s still important for the business, still important for the company, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t delegate it, and you absolutely should.

5 mistakes you’re making with delegation

So that’s how you should be thinking about tasks, first off, is when you should delegate, utilizing this kind of decision matrix for delegation. After you have your mind wrapped around that, we can jump into the five things you don’t wanna do when you delegate. And the first thing you don’t wanna do is skip the why.

If you are giving a team member a task, and you’re just saying, I don’t wanna do this task, you do the task, that’s a horrible reason. People aren’t getting bought in to that reason. Explain the why behind what they’re doing. Hey, I need you to schedule the email newsletter every single week, here’s the cadence, so on and so forth.

And the reason we do this is because we want to build relationships with the people who want to hear from us, and ultimately, we wanna help them make impact in their lives. If you can explain that, the why behind the task that they’re doing, they’ll be more bought in, and they’ll do it to the best of their ability.

If you act like it’s just something that you don’t wanna do, people aren’t going to want to do it that much either, right? They’re not motivated behind it. So when you delegate, make sure you explain the why. Next is do not neglect training and standards. This happens all the time. I see entrepreneurs who are really swamped, and they hire somebody they can barely, barely find the time to bring them on, so they heavily neglect training these people properly, and holding a standard or setting a standard for these people.

I get it, you’re busy, you need to hire, and when you hire, that’s when you have to, even if you lose money, you have to set aside time to train your people properly, and then also hold them to a standard, or all you’ll do is complain constantly that someone never does it right, they never do it as good as you, and it’s because you never really empowered them to get to that level, and so you have to have the training, and then also have a standard for every single thing that needs to get done.

Another thing is don’t start with high value. We talked about that kind of in the decision matrix. I see this happen sometimes too. People are like, I don’t wanna go do that in-person workshop anymore, or I don’t wanna have to do any face-to-face meetings or build relationships. Maybe you’re more of an introvert, and you wanna delegate that stuff out, but it’s so high value, you really don’t wanna give that to your team yet until they’ve earned that trust, and they really can’t handle something like that, so don’t start with a high value task, and especially don’t skip the Y, neglect training and standards, and give them a high value task.

You are just setting yourself up and them up for failure. Next, don’t forget to follow up. You have to follow up with your team, okay? If you have delegated something to them, and you’re like, okay, I forget about that now, you are doing it, follow up periodically, especially in the beginning. Make sure you’re going over the standards you’ve set for that task, and follow up and see how they’re doing.

Don’t let them sit in the dark and just try and figure things out while some of that is good, letting people be challenged and grow and all of those things. You don’t wanna forget to follow up with them and see how they’re doing and get any feedback that you can. Now, the last thing, don’t fear holding a standard.

Now, I said you have to set a standard. The most important part of setting a standard is then holding people to that standard. If there’s a certain level of attention to detail or work that needs to be done, you need to hold that standard, and sometimes that takes an uncomfortable conversation. You cannot fear having that uncomfortable conversation.

If someone’s not doing it to your standard, you need to have the uncomfortable conversation, and then explain, hey, you’re kinda skipping steps here, and I know that’s not what I put out in the training, and I’d like to know why you’re skipping those steps, and here’s why I think these steps are super important.

You have to have those uncomfortable conversations, or else your brand and your business will start to run away from you and turn into something that you don’t really want, and your people aren’t very effective. After you skip those five don’ts, let’s get to the five dos. Now, you do want to empower your team.

You want to give them autonomy. You wanna make sure that they’re able to complete the task, they have the resources to be able to do that, and they feel empowered to do so. If they need authority, give them the authority. If they need money, give them the money. Make sure they have all the resources they need to be able to get the task done.

Do also challenge your team. You wanna make sure that there’s some level of personal growth and business professional growth, so giving them a task where you don’t have to lay every single thing out. The way I like to look at it is telling your team what done looks like, okay? When this is done, here’s what it should look like.

I’m not gonna tell you how to get there. You need to figure out how to get there, whether they need to do their own research, do their own YouTube search, or whatever it is. Challenge them to learn and grow. That’s gonna help empower and give that autonomy, and it’s gonna help them realize, hey, I’m not a mindless robot.

5 things you MUST do to delegate well

I am here to be a very impactful team member, and you will challenge them, and they will grow in the process. The third thing you wanna do is give that feedback, and don’t forget to compliment. So one thing that I talk to entrepreneurs about all the time is not being afraid to give feedback and having that uncomfortable conversation, and sometimes they start to nail that, but then they forget to praise and compliment their employees.

Typically, you wanna do this in a team setting and compliment one person in front of the entire team. If you only have one employee, still. Make sure, if they did something right, they did a good job, you’re taking the time to compliment them, so giving them the feedback when they’re not holding to the standard, that’s absolutely paramount, but don’t forget, people need praise, too.

They need to know they’re doing a good job. The paycheck says part of that, right, but you also need to use your words. Verbalize the fact that they are doing a good job. Make it very specific. Don’t be like, hey, you did a good job this week. Keep it up. If you say, hey, you took a lot of initiative on Project X.

You did it in these steps, one, two, and three. That was awesome. You figured these things out on your own. I really, really want to see more of that. Such a great job. You know, that was awesome. That is a better way to compliment and give feedback. The fourth thing you want to do is you do want to encourage self-critique.

Now, this might be a little bit more specific to, again, growing the team member, but asking them, how could you have done this better? And you can open that with like, hey, I don’t actually have any ideas. I’m just curious, how could this process be better? How could you have done better in this process?

When you’re doing things like that, you’re starting to build a different type of company culture, a company culture where we’re always trying to get better. The status quo really isn’t okay. If you see a way to do something that’s easier, faster, better, cheaper, I want to hear about it. And so having that feedback sessions, but encouraging, hey, how could you do this better?

How could you be more effective here or there? Make sure they’re always thinking that way, and you start to build a team culture that you really enjoy being a part of. And the last thing is you want to give a growth plan. And this is gonna be very dependent on the type of employee who you hired, but you want to give them a plan or path for growth.

Because if you have really good rockstar employees, and they don’t see how they fit into your organization long-term, they don’t understand the vision, they think that they could do this on their own, you’re gonna lose a team member. And it’s harder than ever to keep people around. It’s just kind of the new environment we live in.

why this is a lifelong leadership skill

People like to hop around here and there. Make sure that you’re giving a growth plan, okay? Make sure that they have a trajectory, a path that they can follow. They know if I do these things, I am going to grow within this business, and I will get better. Now, if you can do all of those things, you can kind of wrap around your mind around what to delegate, high-value tasks, low-value tasks, general tasks, unique tasks, and you hit these five do’s and don’ts with delegation, you will be more effective.

And leverage is what you will be gaining. You’ll be leveraging your time because other people will be doing the things that you need them to do, so you can focus on the most important tasks. It is not easy. Leadership and delegation, one of the hardest things you will ever do. And to be honest, it’s a Sisyphean effort.

Like, you will never feel like you are done, right? You always have to get better at this. You always have to build relationships with a team and communicate and effectively delegate. It does not get easy, but it is worth it. And to do it, you’re gonna have to try harder.