Issue 23: Delegating as a Chief of Staff
You need to delegate what you think you are best at. You need to stand back, watch the work you used to once doing best, being done by someone else, and resist the urge to interfere. Results won't be exactly as you would like them to be, but soon you will have a company that can do more than you, and earn more than you alone. You graduate from bein... See more
Alexey added
Successful delegation is directly related to having processes in place for others to follow.
Edward Hess • Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Entrepreneurial Businesses
Understanding how to delegate is perhaps the most valuable thing an entrepreneur can learn. Doing everything yourself does not scale. Being able to delegate well is akin to being able to lead well, and frankly, to being able to get shit done. And effective delegation is not easy. When it comes to managing a team, there is no such thing as “set it a
... See moreJeffrey W. Sass • Everything I Know about Business and Marketing, I Learned from THE TOXIC AVENGER: (One Man's Journey to Hell's Kitchen and Back)
Yoshio Goto added
Consistency between Shreyas Doshi's Radical Delegation Framework and Tao Te Ching:
Tao Te Ching, Verse 17
"When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, 'Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!'"
—Lao Tzu
Recurring projects and tasks are some of the first things to start delegating to other people. As a general rule, if you can list the steps it takes to do something, you can delegate all or major parts of the work to someone else.
Charlie Gilkey • Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done
you actually need to do the opposite and reduce your scope by shedding parts of your responsibility to enable new teams around them. This feels very counterintuitive after years of trying to gain additional scope. But the decision here is that you can either keep it all yourself and do a B job at it, or you can shed these areas to enable them to al... See more
reforge.com • Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader — Reforge
Mila Superstar added
that means it is probably transferable. Leadership demands that you move it down the organizational tree. If there is a known path of the work, and it is repetitive, it can probably be taught. And if someone else can be taught to do it, it might be time to delegate that work, so that you can get back to doing what only you can do: lead.