Leadership Minute: Clear Your To-Do List With Delegation

Leaders must learn to delegate to clear their time for their most crucial priorities

When I first became a leader, I made an all-too-common mistake—I tried to do everything myself.

It was 2011, and my company was earning about $1 million in annual revenue, with a small team. I was the face of the company, and I was also overseeing marketing, sales, and client services. It was unsustainable.

I needed to delegate, but I wasn’t sure how. Or, more accurately, I was fearful of letting go.

Unless you’re a master delegator, you probably have a lot of tasks on your plate that don’t warrant your time. That’s why, in a recent session with the Elevate Club, I did a deep dive talk on effective delegation. You can watch the entire talk at the bottom of this post, but I also wanted to offer some highlights.

Why Delegate

As you rise up the leadership ladder, you’ll have increasingly more demands on your time—strategy meetings, one-on-ones with direct-reports, external duties, just to name a few. As your time grows limited, you need invest all your remaining hours in the things that are most important to the business.

For example, if you have two free hours in a day, is it smart to spend that limited time reviewing resumes for new hires? Or is it better to delegate that job to your team and use those two hours thinking deeply about your company’s strategy, and how it might need to change to adapt to the market in the next year?

These are the choices leaders face every day. It’s essential to deprioritize anything that can be delegated to people who have more time for less high-leverage work.

Plus, delegating is a great way to develop your team. If you delegate an important task to one of your employees, you may discover that person thrives with added responsibility and is a rising star. Delegation can help you identify future leaders and top performers and give them more opportunities to grow.

If this hasn’t convinced you, remember this: as a leader, your job is to build a high-functioning team and help others grow and succeed, not do everything yourself.

Tips For Delegation

In the video below, I dig into some tactical steps for deciding what to delegate, and how to do it. Here is a quick summary of what you’ll see in more detail in the keynote: