052 How anyone can unleash the power of delegation

To truly accomplish more—and to release the best within you— you need to unleash the power of delegation. And you don’t need to be a leader of a business to do so.

This week’s Inspire Me quote is from Harry S. Truman:

“You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.”

Back in episode 50, Leary and Armin talked about the need to develop strategic margin. The key concept from that episode is that to increase margin, it’s more effective to increase personal power than decreasing load. One of the five ways to do so is by increasing your delegative power.

There are many benefits of good delegation: save time, achieve more, relieve stress, empower others, increase flexibility, balance workloads and strengthen communications. But despite the benefits, delegation can be difficult to do because it’s difficult to give up the personal rewards we receive from doing something well. We may also have a such a strong vision for how something should be done and we don’t want to “settle” for less from someone else. And, often we may have concerns that we might have to spend more time recovering from a failed effort that we’ve delegated to another.

There’s a difference between delegating a task and living out of delegative power. The former is expedient to get something off our plate. The latter is a lifestyle requires understanding of your own strengths and that of others and a tremendous amount of trust. The key is knowing yourself. Leary shared this quote from Randy Komisar: “Passion pulls you toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can’t tell the difference.” The real test of delegative power is that you don’t care, as Harry Truman suggests, who gets the credit.

To decide what to delegate:

1. Look for systemic, recurring things you do that consume time.
2. Ask yourself, what is the opportunity cost? Often we keep doing something because we don’t understand opportunity cost.
3. Decide that the thing you are going to do instead is a higher value use of your time.
4. Find someone with the strengths needed to delegate the task to.

This week’s Challenge Me:

Decide your higher purpose objective. What’s keeping you from it? What can you delegate to another? Then do it.

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

• Why you need strategic margin, Reinventure Me episode 50 on strategic margin and why delegative power is an essential element to achieving it.