How to Delegate: Communicate Early and Often
Since I got married, I’ve been much more inspired to finish work at a reasonable hour, and spend time with my wife. I used to work late into the evening in order to finish everything. This means I can’t have inefficient days anymore if I want to enjoy the evening.
But if I can’t work late, and my workload hasn’t decreased, how is this possible? Through delegation.
I am by no means a master at delegation. For starters, I don’t have a big team to delegate to. I don’t have virtual assistants, or juniors who want my job. But on productions, there are vendors galore, and the more I can get them to do, the less falls on my shoulders.
Communicating early and often is key here.
One of the traps I often fall into when it comes to delegation is waiting too long. I want to have all my ducks in a row, and team them how to tap dance before I pass a project off. This is a bad habit. People do things different ways, and that’s ok. Part of delegation is letting go of your specific way of doing things. So if people are going to do things differently than me anyway, there’s no use in setting things up exactly the way I want them set up. It’s more efficient to pass the project off.
There have been projects when the work got out of hand, and I didn’t delegate soon enough. Time went on, and I waited too long to delegate. By the time I passed the project off, the person helping me didn’t have enough time to do it.
The two most important things you can give someone who you’re delegating to are time and trust. If they don’t have time, trust is just a feel-good concept. And if they don’t have trust, all the time in the world leads to second guessing.
So when you delegate, do it sooner rather than later. I understand some things need to be sorted before you pass things along. But you’d be surprised by the intuition and initiative that smart, hungry people will show when you give them a job with a little time and trust.
