Like many of you, for our business to grow, I need to make the move from working IN the business to working ON the business. What’s getting in my way? It’s the simplest, hardest thing I’ve encountered in growing our agency. Delegation.

I keep getting in my own way.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as an entrepreneur is learning to let go enough so that someone else can help carry the load. I’ve come to realize that I’m a closet control freak. As a designer, I immediately know in my head what I want something to look like, how I think the user interface of a website should feel, or the words I want to use to help a client tell their story. Once I’ve latched onto this in my mind, it’s hard to let go.

Once we move past that, I hit my next roadblock. The strategy for a project is in place, and we’ve moved on to the execution stage. At this point, delegation should be easy, right? Now would be an excellent time for me to delegate some pieces of the project to my team, but I hold on tight instead. Why? Because I’m too busy with other things to slow down and create a plan for someone to help me. Stop and think about that for a moment. I don’t delegate because I’m too busy. The solution is right in front of me. If I did delegate, I could fix the busy-ness issue in my business.

It doesn’t stop there. Some days an email lands in my inbox with a client asking for something simple and small, a ten-minute project. Immediately, I battle between “I should delegate this,” and “It’s going to take me longer to explain it than it would to just do it myself.” The choice can be paralyzing, and many times I end up just doing the project rather than delegating it. It’s “faster.” Unfortunately, this does a huge disservice to the younger designers on our team who are trying to learn. My selfishness and being in a hurry is preventing them from developing their own talent, which in turn affects our ability to grow long-term as an organization. It also keeps me down in the trenches, working IN the business, when I could be adding more value working ON the business.

This past year has been focused on fixing my delegation issues.

Here are three things I’ve done to create the change I needed to move forward:

  1. Schedule time dedicated toward project delegation. I meet with my team every week on Wednesday mornings to discuss the right projects to delegate.
  2. Create a process for delegating projects. We developed a simple creative brief we can use internally when we delegate. It streamlines the delegation process and ensures our team has the tools they need to be successful.
  3. Let go. A good mentor of mine told me a long time ago that when you delegate, you need to be comfortable that something might get done differently than you would have done it. Many times, setting ego aside, it probably gets done better.

You may be reading this and thinking to yourself, “This sounds great, but I don’t have anyone I can delegate to.” I get it because I’ve been there, and unfortunately I don’t have the answer for that. I do know this. Time is one of the most valuable resources we each have, and there’s never enough of it. That said, when the opportunity comes to delegate, and we have someone we can delegate to, that’s an advantage we shouldn’t waste.

The Takeaway:

Get out of your own way. Delegate one thing this week that will allow you to work on something else and help you create an even more significant impact.