If you hope to grow your revenue, your teams, and your company, you have to find a way to delegate. There’s simply no way around it.

In today’s episode, co-hosts Richard Lindner and Jeff Mask take on the evergreen, but ever-challenging, topic of delegation. Delegation is something all leaders need to take a look at annually (okay, and monthly, weekly, daily), but it’s especially timely right now. As we kick off a new year and aspire to achieve new goals, we realize we can’t continue to own everything we owned last year if we hope to grow this year. We’ve got to find a way to hand off tasks.

So how do we do it? Who do we delegate to? How do we let go of control? How do we set the person up for success?

Listen in as Richard and Jeff answer all of these important questions and more. 

If you’re paralyzed by fear at the very thought of delegation, you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve delegated in the past and gotten burned. Maybe you tried to delegate and ended up wasting a bunch of time and doing everything yourself anyway.

Jeff says that leaders often find themselves in a difficult doom loop when they try to delegate:

1. I’m so overwhelmed
2. I semi-delegate a critical task
3. I semi-train someone on said task
4. It doesn’t work out, and I take it back over
5. Repeat 

But what if a simple mindset shift could make you sprint toward delegation instead of running away? What if you could delegate confidently and give up control easily? What if you could help your team truly own what you’re delegating, and then grow it beyond anything you could have done yourself? What if you really invested the time to train people well? What could happen in your future?

Most of us leaders have the human tendency to want to control things. This makes delegation challenging. But the more you delegate, the easier it gets. Your company can’t grow if you’re always holding on to the most important things. And it’s always the most important thing for where you’re at. It’s not the most important thing for where you want to go. If you don’t delegate, you’re always going to be treading water. You won’t get anywhere. 

It all starts with your mindset. Think of the top of that doom loop. You’re so busy. You’re so overwhelmed. Replace: “I’m so busy” with “I have all the time in the world.” And look at what happens to your energy and your thinking. When we think that way, rather than using busyness as a badge of honor, we have all the time in the world to go create and innovate. It enables our mind to delegate in a truer form, a way that’s more enduring and sustainable instead of coming from a place of scarcity and fear and franticness. 

Jeff learned a methodology 20 years ago as a Scout Master teaching 13-year-old boys. It’s called E.D.G.E.

• Explain
• Demonstrate
• Guide
• Enable

Explain the why behind the task you’re delegating. Help them understand why it matters to them, the purpose behind it. Give visual aids/examples to solidify the idea/end product.

Demonstrate the actual skill when done well. Show them what success looks like, all the while keeping in mind that they might do it a little differently than you do.

Guide them, coach them through the process. This is where you let them try and experiment, so it sinks deep into them, instead of just watching you, then being left on their own. This step takes time and patience. This is the key step we...