The Art and Science of Delegation

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. So we’re still diving into questions, issues, concerns that we are seeing from entrepreneurs who have applied to be part of the beyond the apex community. If you remember, if you go and you sign up to get on the waitlist and to be considered into the program, we ask a question at the end of it, which is if you could wave a magic wand and fix any one thing inside of your business, what would that one thing be? And we’ve collected so many interesting responses, and over the last week, we’ve been going in this podcast through some of those. So we’ve talked about how to give yourself permission to rest, like some tactics that you can use to as an entrepreneur, give yourself the permission that you require to actually shut down and not be working around the clock. We did another episode on how to improve your email open rates on your email list, how you can go from 15, 20% open rates up to 40, 50, 60%. So in this episode, I want to talk about delegation, the keys to effective delegation, because this is one of the concerns that has come up in those surveys. And we’ve collected hundreds and hundreds of surveys at this point, hundreds of people wanting to be part of the beyond the apex community. And delegation is a big one.

Management, how do I hire people? How do I train? How do I offboard these tasks to people? And this is one of the hardest skills, I think, as an entrepreneur to master. But it is the master skill because truly, if you could think about the fact that you could build a billion dollar business right now, if you had the ability to hire the right person, to train them, to onboard them, to recruit them, and then to point them in a direction, for instance, if you could recruit Warren Buffett to your team, then you could easily build a multi billion dollar business, right? But because you don’t have the ability to get his talent and to delegate what needs to be done to him to get the things done, you can’t grow that business. And so the ability to work with and through other people is the master skill of entrepreneurship. And, and it’s a hard one because in the beginning, you’re probably just a solopreneur. You’re doing all the work yourself. You’re wearing all the different hats, you’re doing the marketing, you’re doing the operations, the product design, the fulfillment, you’re doing the content, you’re doing the finances, you’re wearing every single hat. And so as you start to grow and you start to butt up against the ceiling of your capacity, you start to think, okay, I need to hire somebody because that’s what everybody tells you that you need to do. And so what will probably happen is you will go hire somebody, but because you’re still so busy tied up working inside the business, you don’t really have the time to give that person the onboarding, to give them the training that they really need to be able to survive and thrive in this new world.

And so what ends up happening is they do the work at a lower standard than you, than you could have done, and it takes them longer to accomplish it, so it takes them longer to do less quality work. And so as an entrepreneur, we often get frustrated in this situation. We just take back the activity and we say, you know what? Hiring just isn’t for me. I can’t get anybody to care about my business, care about my customers the way that I do. And that’s true. But the problem here actually generally isn’t the employees. It’s you as the entrepreneur. It’s the systems that you have.

It’s the process that you have for onboarding and for training people and then delegating effectively the tasks to them. So in this episode, I want to talk about some things that maybe can help conceptualize the idea of delegation. That’d be very, very helpful. Number one is it’s all about managing expectations and resources. The very first question you have to ask yourself when somebody is struggling on your team is, are they struggling from slack or lack? And generally what? Generally, in my experience, it’s a lack. It’s a lack of resources, lack of accountability, lack of expectations, lack of training, a lack of equipment, something that they lack that you did not give them. And if you go through that equation and you’re like, okay, I’ve given them everything. I’ve trained them multiple times, I’ve given them feedback, and they’re still getting it wrong.
I’ve given them all the equipment, I’ve given them all the resources to succeed, and they’re still not doing the job to my standard. Well, now you can start to ask yourself, well, maybe it’s a slack. Maybe they’re slacking on something. It’s some personality trait, in which case, maybe it’s just that you have the wrong person in that seat. But the key to, I think, being like, to building an effective team is to first look through the lens of what am I as the leader doing wrong that has set them up for failure? Because I believe systems fail, not people. And so whenever somebody fails, whenever they come back, and it took them longer to do the activity or they came back at a lower quality than you expected. That is a coaching opportunity. Whenever we make mistakes, that’s an opportunity to coach and to grow.

And we should never make the same mistake twice, but we should be comfortable making mistakes, not repeating them, but making mistakes the first time so we can have the opportunity to learn, to grow, and to reflect. So that’s one really big one, is to give your team permission to try to fail, but to set the expectation that you cannot make the same mistake twice. When you make the same mistake twice, it’s a failure of your systems, the process that you had in place, and that can be fixed. So that’s, number one, systems fail, not people. Okay, let’s talk about expectations. I think a lot of times when we struggle with delegation, what we’re really doing is we’re giving a task and then we’re constantly checking back in on it. And that’s the wrong way to delegate because you’ll never be able to take that mental space out of your brain for that activity if it’s still on you for following back up and checking to see how it got done. What you wanna do, instead of setting expectations based on how to do the thing, you wanna set the expectations based on what it would look like when this thing is completed at the standard that you expect, set the destination.

Leave it for your team to figure out how to get there. We don’t hire dogs and then do the barking for them. Right. We hire smart people that have the abilities, have the skills to teach us that we can grow from. And so really all we need to do is direct their genius towards the destination that we’re trying to get to. And we let them figure it out. Now, if they take the wrong path, if they come back and it’s not exactly how you want, again, that’s a coaching opportunity. But as the entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with the knowledge that your team is probably only ever going to deliver results at about 80% of your ability.

You could probably do it better because you care more, you’re going to put more into it. Maybe you’ve been doing it longer so you have more experience with it, but your team doing the activity at 80% and producing the results is better than you spending 100% of your time and energy to get to 100% and not being able to grow and service your business as a result. So you have to be okay with 80% being good enough from your team and to managing to an expectation of this is what complete looks like, and then let them go and trust that they will run towards it. And again, this is a problem. This is like natural selection. It’s all about evolution. It’s all about adaptability and being comfortable with those micro failures that lead to macro successes. We don’t want to delegate tasks that could lead to macro failures.

Never delegate something to a team member that could put you out of business. Right. Don’t give them those keys to the vehicle. Give them the keys to the vehicle that you’re okay with them scratching and denting. Right. But don’t give them the thing that if they were to crash it, it’s going to take out everybody on the team. That’s the stuff that you retain for yourself until you grow to that level where you can bring in the C suite executives who you can trust with those existential issues. Right.
But generally, I think the reason that we struggle with delegation is we have this impossible standard inside of our minds for what we expect of the people around us. And it’s all about recalibrating that expectation and then making it very clear to your team what it is that you expect of them. And then when they fail, you hold them accountable. But when they succeed, even if it’s in a way that you didn’t expect, that you reward that you reinforce that behavior. I think accountability is a side of the delegation that a lot of us look completely miss. Often as the entrepreneur, we think when they get it wrong, I just need to swoop in and play the hero. But you’re denying your team the opportunity to learn and to grow whenever you do that. So the biggest thing that you have to learn as the entrepreneur is how to get out of the team’s way to let them go ride the bicycle and potentially fall over knowing that it’s not going to kill them, but they’re gonna learn something valuable in the process of having skinned their knee.

A really good story I heard a number of years ago. I can’t remember who it was, but they’re talking about how they had this employee who. Well, actually, there’s two cool stories here. One is, I think it was Sears, the guy. One of his employees made a mistake on the purchasing inventory side of things that ended up costing the company like a million dollars. Right? A lot of money. Later asked is like, from somebody on the team, like, hey, you gonna fire this person? You can let them go. What’s the outcome that, how are you going to punish this person? And he goes, I don’t fire people for making mistakes.
I fire them for repeating mistakes, but not for making the mistakes that happens and how we move forward from that will dictate a lot of the team culture and the morale that you establish. If your team is always, if you punish people for making that first mistake, then your team will take that, they’ll internalize that, they’ll play it safe. And you can’t grow a business by not making mistakes. It’s just impossible. But we do want to de incentivize making multiple mistake or making the same mistake multiple times. The other story that I heard, I think this was Alex who was talking about, he had a launch and somebody sent out an email too soon, and it effectively cost them like a million dollars on this product launch. And when asked, like, what’d you do? How did you punish someone? Did you fire them? And he goes, no, I just paid a million dollars for that tuition. That person is never going to like, I know for a fact that person will never make that mistake again.

If I hire somebody new, there’s always a chance they could make that one. But that this person that I, that we lost a million dollars with, that person will never make this mistake. They will make new mistakes in new, novel, interesting ways. Right? But they won’t make this one again. So those are some ideas around delegation. If you want to learn more of the tactics of, like, how do we manage one on one meetings, weekly cadences and resources for doing, like, performance improvement plans, then beyond theapex.com, that is the community for you. This is literally the entire playbook, the resources, the toolbox that I’ve assembled over the last twelve ish years, 13 years, building businesses so that can really help accelerate and fast track your growth as the entrepreneur. Because at the end of the day, your business, your rocket ship, is only going to go as fast as you, the pilot, are comfortable flying it.

So if you think that’d be valuable to you, go check it out. Beyondtheapex.com dot. We’ll catch you guys in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focus, my friends.