Delegation Will Save Your Leadership (and Maybe Your Life)
/Darius works 85 hours a week. When he isn't developing the new strategic plan and leading staff meetings, he's answering the phones, filing quarterly taxes, and processing customer payments. People outside say he's a rock star: a younger Elon Musk. Those on the inside know the truth. Darius can't delegate, and it's killing Darius and the company.
Darius is an idea architect—an INTP on the Myers Briggs Type Inventory. He's excellent at creating a vision—almost a sixth sense regarding market trends. In the early days of his manufacturing company, he had to do it all. He hired a sales team and back-office administrative support as the company grew. But nobody has a job description. When the team pushes Darius to help them understand a change in focus, he gets frustrated, "Why can't you guys just get on board?" This is the story of how Darius and his company changed.
URL: Schedule a free consultation with a business coach.
Delegation Requires Honesty (and Humility)
Darius will never be a detailed administrator. Tax filings are late. Customer emails go unanswered. Requests from staff never get addressed. Instead of accepting his natural limits, Darius bought into the concept of the self-made man: an ideal built on a lie.
We can all point at the great men of industrialism—Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison. But these were not self-made men; they were opportunists. Change the variables—increase the cost of labor and wages, change the political system, augment the terms of industrial capacity or natural resources, —and these men and their companies fail, fading into obscurity. One example: working conditions at the original Ford plant were atrocious. (One girl lost a finger in the machinery and "just put a rag around her hand and quietly walked out" 5). By contrast, read how Pixar actively cultivates collaborative creativity.
No leader can be the structure, the support, and the visionary. Nobody is the conductor and the orchestra. Leaders that won't accept the limits that nature gives them will never achieve the levels of greatness business provides. After working with a business coach, Darius confessed to his team that he regularly failed to meet their basic requests because he didn't know how to delegate. He could only do so much: he was limited. And he was determined to change.
Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
—Paul Batalden
Delegation Requires Trust
Darius was training Jonathan to take over some of the administrative details of the company. Jonathan was managing Darius' calendar, inbox, and phone messages and was taking over sales reports. One weekly report required an SQL generating a .CSV to .PDF conversion, uploaded to an internal drive—involving the database and three additional programs.
If those acronyms don’t make sense to you, you’re in good company. It didn’t make sense of Jonathan either which is why he botched the first report upload because he needed to adjust the date range of the SQL. Darius looked at it and said, "I'm taking it back. I knew I couldn't trust you to get it done." Put the report in context: no sales were lost, no accounts flubbed, and no relationships were harmed. One shipment was delayed a few days, but the customer was okay with it.
The business coach had Darius identify why Jonathan's failure felt like a breach of trust. Darius ran through his dictionary of corporate jargon: excellence, quality, core competencies, best practices, impact, and scalability.
His business coach pressed in, "Sounds like BS to me." Darius got quiet, put on his moody eyes, and then sighed. "I just hate experiencing disappointment." Leadership is disappointment. Any time a person or organization changes, resistance is expressed as disappointment. Ronald Heifetz and Martin Linsky wrote that "exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb." (Leadership on the Line, 142)
"We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior."
Darius is also an Enneagram Type 8. His core fear of being controlled by others hinders his ability to trust. He agreed to name that fear with Jonathan. Now, every time Darius relinquishes a new task, he says, "I have a hard time trusting that you'll do this right, but I want to learn to trust people." (Jonathan always slyly replies, "And I'll try not to disappoint you…too much.”)
Delegation Requires Clarity
An introspective, intuitive, thinking type (Myers Briggs type INTP) gets frustrated when pushed for concrete specificity for the same reason an extraverted, sensing, judging type (ESFJ) quits without it: communication and relationship preferences. All personality types require clarity. Some know it and give it. Others assume it.
James Kouzes and Barry Posner found that "The people who have the greatest clarity about personal and organizational values have the highest degree of commitment to the organization…. People can be very clear about the organization's values and not be highly committed." (Leadership Challenge, 55). Your employees need clarity.
When Darius initially started to delegate, it lacked clarity. As his ability to articulate his vision concretely improved, people got excited. But something unexpected happened: Darius' vision changed. He saw his potential as a builder, not a manager. He hired a manager to run operations and shifted his time to product expansion. He is happier. His staff is more committed, and his company is more robust.
Mission: Delegate
Effective delegation is not simply about assigning tasks. Embracing your own limits invites others to become their best selves. This exploration of trust creates the relational capital you need to get from Point A to Point Z: building a stronger and more successful company. By mastering the art of delegation, you save your leadership and yourself.