One of my clients, Ken, runs a very successful service business. He has two employees who do administrative tasks. His problem: he hasn’t been able to free up enough time to pursue projects that capture his imagination and will propel the business forward — largely because he is not comfortable with delegating. By inventorying his work habits and style, we found that:
- His default work style is to do things himself rather than delegate to his staff. (For example, he opens his own mail, although his staff does put it in a separate stack for him.)
- He listens to dozens of voicemails every day, of which a third to half are solicitations from salespeople he does not know for items he does not need. Also, he listens to them as soon as the red message light flashes on the phone, which makes it difficult to have uninterrupted time to concentrate.
- He has not trained his staff to handle clients as well as they could. They answer the phone for him and take messages but don’t try to resolve the caller’s issue themselves.
Given that Ken is an ambitious entrepreneur who is eager to launch many more business ventures, he wanted to address these issues as soon as possible. Ken agreed to make some critical changes to the way he does business. Here’s what he has done so far:
- Started a weekly staff meeting to delegate projects and get the staff’s feedback on how they can do more substantive work. His employees were thrilled and look forward to bringing their ideas to the meeting. They are being challenged like never before and have more job satisfaction.
- His staff now screen all voicemails and handle everything that does not absolutely require his attention. Ken has given them a list of clients who are priority and must get a call back from him immediately, but most calls can be handled without his intervention.
These changes seem easy, don’t they? For some they are, for many they are not. I almost didn’t write this post, thinking these points were too basic. Then I thought of a time about 20 years ago when I got into a lot of trouble because I was a miserable delegator. Here’s what happened:
I was editor of weekly business newspaper and one of my functions was writing the headlines for page one. Little did I know I was about to have my own “Dewey Beats Truman” moment. I wrote a particular headline that was really exciting and a bit shocking. Problem was, it had little to do with the story that followed it. Our process for putting out the paper was that every reporter and editor in the newsroom read a copy of page one to look for mistakes. They all saw my headline. They all knew it was wrong. But no one said anything!
Why?
They assumed that since I wrote it, it was the headline I wanted. And since I did so many other things myself in my (then) autocractic style, they didn’t think I’d want my authority questioned. Well, I wish they had challenged me. When the paper came out on Monday I was covering a convention and the CEO of the company I’d written the headline about was the keynote speaker. He held up the paper and railed against the false headline. I wanted to sink into the floor.
It’s not easy to trust other people with your business. When you know you can do it better and faster yourself, it’s so tempting to take that shortcut. Entrepreneurs who learn managed delegation (as opposed to delegating without giving clear direction) gain efficiency and have time to create new opportunities. And avoid potentially embarrassing (or worse) mistakes.
One of my favorite entrepreneurs is Jamey Bennett, founder and CEO of 
