The Levels of Delegation

An easy way to become a better delegator is to identify what will unlock more leverage for yourself. Jonathan broke it down into 5 levels, with one more that he’s building at Athena.

#1 — Novice: Delegation by Task

Jonathan has seen thousands of delegators start their journey and, without help from Athena’s delegation training, this is where most people end up getting stuck.

They request their assistant to execute individual tasks, over and over. They delegate things as they come up, sort of like a stream of consciousness.

Example: “Find flowers for my friend’s birthday.”

#2 — Intermediate: Delegation by Project

This is where you start to give a bit more responsibility to your assistant as projects are larger and more complex than individual tasks.

There are three types of projects you can delegate:

One-off → Similar to the Novice level but with more pieces. Ex: “Plan my friend’s birthday.”

Recurring → A project that happens on a set interval. Ex: “Prepare a report of my personal finances on the 1st of each month.”

Trigger-based → Projects that can happen on any interval, and are triggered by a specific thing. Ex: “Every time I fly to a new city [aka the trigger] plan and schedule an entrepreneur dinner.”

#3 — Advanced: Delegation by Process

What you have in your head as the expected outcome of assigning a project to an assistant is likely different than what they will execute. You simply have more context on what you want than you’ll have given them.

At the third stage you start to look at yourself and your personal preferences as a set of algorithms, and your goal is to describe and offload those algorithms to your assistant.

Rather than just asking your assistant to plan an entrepreneur dinner when you fly to a new city, you create an algorithm for them that constrains the problem they’re solving for.

For example, maybe the dinner must meet the following criteria:

8-10 people (right size)

Attendees must have a certain number of employees or revenue, or be in a certain industry

This is a simple example, and the chances are you’ll need to make adjustments to the algorithm the first few times you have your assistant run it, but then they’ll be able to do it successfully forever.

#4 — Expert: Delegation by Goal

Most delegators never give their assistants context on their goals, they just assign them tasks or projects.

But to truly become an expert delegator and unlock time abundance you need to be more transparent and open up more to your assistant.

The two main benefits of this are that your assistant can:

Deliver results and prioritize with your larger goals in mind

Flag opportunities for new projects that align with your goals

Once you get this right your assistant goes from just executing to being able to start anticipating your needs. You no longer need to explain as many details of every project you assign them ahead of time.

#5 — Mastery: Clairvoyant Delegation

Jonathan says this is the nirvana of delegation, and that mediocre delegators think it doesn’t even exist.

At this stage you’re in perfect alignment with your assistant or, more likely, team of assistants — Jonathan has five spread across different areas of his work and non-work life.

You’re working only on tasks you’re uniquely suited to do, and your assistant(s) handle the rest. You trust them as much as a family member and they can discover and execute tasks without even needing to clear them with you first. Often the first time you hear about

Michael Houck • World Class Delegation (from a Unicorn Founder)