Business owners regularly complain about working too many hours and not being able to take a vacation. My strategy for replacing myself in the day-to-day workflow offered me enough freedom to enter my “preferment” at age 50. It’s not retirement, I still work, but I only do what I prefer to do. Here’s the journey I took to fire myself and delegate my tasks.
What I Thought I Did
When I think back on the “long ago”, I consider the pivotal moments. I replay the bold choices like creating a logo for the governor out of thin air in two hours, or even that pair of statement glasses and how they made me feel in a meeting—confident, powerful, smarter than the rest of the people in the room. A little protected, even. I think about my mentors. The “can I pick your brain” coffee dates. The missteps, the poor hires, the rebounds—all of the “I’m sorry’s” and the “You’re very welcome’s” in between. I think back to the day I was hit with a sort of mundane realization that ended up changing the direction of my company. I was re-doing the streaky Windex job left behind by my then janitorial team and I said to myself, “I wish I had another me.”
This grievance isn’t unique to me. We’ve all wished for more hours in the day or a second set of hands. When I expressed this to my friend Steve, I told him I wished I could hire a utility infielder. You know, someone who could step in for me just about anywhere I needed them to and they could do a pretty ok job. This person could step up when the first string players were busy, or sick or, oh I don’t know, getting their master’s degree at 50. (That comes later.)
What I Actually Was Doing
Steve scoffed at this idea and probed me a bit and asked me what exactly it is that I do every day. Well, let’s think about it. Today I …
- Vetted potential client
- Scheduled call
- Created presentation
- Pitched concepts
- Wrote and sent proposal
- Updated client websites
- Billing
- Marketing trend research
- Email client with the good news!
- Client campaign reporting
- Client social media management
- Lunch with potential client
- Chamber of Commerce meeting
- Restock snack cabinets
- Vacuum hallway
- Clean coffee maker
- Windex streaky glass
- Read Business Report
Steve read the exhaustive list and laughed. “You sure you don’t want to wash and press your employees’ work shirts, too?” (Business casual was still a thing back then.)
I was doing too much.
Steve told me that instead of hiring a utility infielder to pass the laundry list off to, I should pick the one thing out of the list that I like doing the least.
Easy. Billing. I could hire someone that likes billing! The idea that someone could actually enjoy the tedium required to collect the money that I so enjoyed earning was truly beyond me, but that was the point. Billing was beyond me. Or…I was beyond billing? Either way, I decided right there at that “let me pick your brain” coffee date, that I wasn’t going to do it ever again.
This theory became the protocol for growth at my company. Each year, I would go through my list of tasks, isolate the one that I liked least, and hire someone to do it for me.
Over the years, a second step in this process was developed. The methodology evolved from hiring utility infielders, people that were just decent enough to replace me, to hiring people who were better than me.
A couple more years went by, and a step three to the process materialized quite naturally. I took another look at my list of tasks (much shorter now) and evaluated who among my current staff might be able to take them on. I found that this type of delegation could be done in a way that actually empowers and celebrates the talent on my team.
Do I have an employee who loves to write but doesn’t get to do a whole lot of it? Do I have an employee who derives sincere pleasure from a perfectly color-coded calendar and could enjoy some administrative duties? Or perhaps most importantly, do I have a green employee who could benefit from a developmental task that I can do in my sleep? This step became crucial in personally advancing new team members and building their confidence.
As a leader, there was growth in watching a team member approach something that I’ve done countless times, for the first time. For them, it demonstrated my trust. For me, it offered opportunities to share stories about the “long ago” (2006) like I was a dirty and battered coal miner from 1906.
Here’s what happened when I took a seat in my rocking chair after a long stretch in the trenches of the coal mine: my team innovated. Without me.* They brought ideas to the surface. Some I’d tried before, some I hadn’t. Some of them just as good as mine, and some of them even better.
*Yes, there is an ego death that comes along with this. It’s ok. You can do it.
Analyzing Your Day, Week, Quarter & Year
It’s been a while since I wrote out my initial laundry list of duties. Since then, I’ve deployed various tactics to analyze my day, week, month, quarter and year.
A lot of folks live and die by their Google Calendar—if it’s not in the cal, it’s not happening. I’ve counseled these folks to study their calendars for a month or so to see where they’re actually giving their energy.
A similar method can be used for those whose email inboxes are their whole personality. Study your inbox and see what’s coming in, but more importantly, what’s going out. To experiment more with this method, I’ve even asked my employees to send me recap emails at the end of the week for one month, listing the things we did together. This gave me a comprehensive view of how I was spending my time.
You’d have a really good idea of how I spend my time if you saw my kitchen table. Most days it’s covered with index cards that have my to-do list items written on them in big, chunky writing. As I complete a task I get to experience the great satisfaction of picking up an index card, ripping it in half and throwing it in the trash. I also get to move the cards around throughout the day or week depending on their ever-evolving hierarchy of importance.
One of my favorites is the Eisenhower Method. This exercise was created by Dwight D. Eisenhower as a way to help him more quickly and effectively make decisions. While your office likely isn’t oval and your decisions lean more “marketing strategy” and less “invasion strategy”…the method still stands.
After you’ve familiarized yourself with the Eisenhower Method quadrants, grab a package of index cards and a Sharpie. Over the course of a month, jot down your tasks as you do them, and once completed, drop the index card into the appropriate quadrant.
A month later, take inventory of the cards in each quadrant. How much of your time is spent performing duties that are important, but not urgent? How big is the stack at the top right? Are you dedicating yourself to the problems only you are qualified to solve? Are you sort of unknowingly and in auto-pilot spending time doing tasks that simply don’t need to be done at all?
When you’ve mulled over this visual, spend some time with that bottom right quadrant. Flip through your index cards and review the tasks that both me and Eisenhower suggest that you delegate.
From that pile, place them in the “buckets” of your business. For example, was the task accounting related? That would fall into your Finance category. Did you fire off a proposal? Put that card into the Sales/Marketing category. Did you buy a new box of your team’s favorite granola bar? That’s Operations.
At the end of the month when you’ve completed this exercise, it’s very likely that you’ll discover a stack of index cards worth of evidence that you should start delegating.
Delegate Strategically
Now that you know exactly what it is that you do at your own company, it’s time to sort your tasks into two neat little piles:
- Stuff your staff can handle
- Stuff you don’t have anyone to do
I like to start with the gnats, not the giants. Initially, I focused on offloading the little annoying tasks that I was just C+ at, or just didn’t want to do anymore. Travel was a big one for me. I didn’t want to go to Houston for two days anymore to sit in a hotel conference room in a blazer. I wanted to go to Amsterdam for 14 days and see the Cobra Museum and drink Hertog Jan.
What is no longer a thrill for me, is a thrill for my 23-year-old employee, though. I started training some of my team members to travel. They’d come with me on a quick trip and I’d educate them on the art of hotel points, touchless key entry and the ever-elusive hotel breakfast—which hotels have it and which hotels don’t—and how to file expense reports when they return.
I started creating fancy opportunities for my team that made them feel special. A lateral move with an extra $250.00 a month can make an employee feel seen and valued, all while offloading another gnat. When doing this, I have a particular approach.
Sit them down and have a heart-to-heart. Explain why this task is important and why they’re the perfect fit. Rather than saying something like, “this is the new role, do you want it?”, tell them what you’re thinking, give them the opportunity to try it out and then genuinely ask them what concerns they might have. This approach eliminates the possible guttural “no” that could come from a fear of change or potentially losing a role and workflow they love. When they excitedly agree to experimenting with something new, show them the ropes for the first month and explain that you want them to do it your way, for. now. In the second month, let them tweak the process. Discuss, debate and refine. By the third month, let them fully own it.
If there’s a need that can’t be fulfilled with a current member, then it’s time to hire. You may be used to taking the reins in this area, but a proper preferment means that may not have anything to do with who goes or who comes into your company. Of course, if you lose a president or an HR director, that’s a different story, but when it comes to hiring account managers, strategists, designers or whatever roles make up the majority of your team, you can delegate the process, from beginning to end, to your trusted managerial team.
At Covalent Logic, we tend to hire for three different reasons. The first reason might be that we’re at full capacity. We’re busy! Quick, we need help! We deploy traditional methods of recruiting like posting on job boards and social media, and we reach out to a handful of contacts that over the years, have come to know the archetype of human that tends to be successful at my agency. When we get a couple bites from these methods, we rely heavily on references—people willing to vouch for the candidate. Ideally, those references are reaching out to us, waxing poetic about their friend or former colleague or employee. We prefer not to reach out to references listed in a resume. We’re after the folks that people go out of their way to share the accolades of. It’s an unsolicited referral system that’s worked really well for us.
The second reason we might hire is anticipated full-up-ness. It’s when we’re not quite at capacity now, but we believe we will be in six or eight months, so we start putting feelers out for someone who’s timeline for transition and change aligns with ours. Occasionally, this temperature-taking of the workforce results in discovering an incredible person a handful of months before we actually need them, in which case, we’d bring them in sooner.
Thirdly, folks will occasionally send a resume over because they’ve heard good things about our agency. We’re always happy to talk. Sometimes we get a sense about people even if they don’t quite match the exact needs of an open position. That was the case with our current social media strategist. We thought she was absolutely great, but her skill set wasn’t that of an account manager, so we created a space for her. Much like dating, hiring is a “when you know, you know” kind of thing.
And equally as important, that intuition lends itself to knowing when someone is simply not a fit. We say no to salary requests higher than we can pay. We say no to candidates who ask if we can wait for them for x amount of time. We say no to people with a scattered work history. We say no to inflated egos. Always. And we say no to candidates who don’t have a unanimous ‘yes’ vote from the hiring team. If there is even one ‘I’m not so sure’, we say no.
I think the most important part of delegating hiring as you transition into preferment is that you’ve got to be either all the way in, or all the way out. Meaning, you’re either present or absent for the entire lifecycle of the hiring process. There is no popping in to see how things are going. Does this require an incredible amount of trust? Yes. But remember, you’ve spent the last three years cultivating that trust. They’ve got this.
