08 Delegate To Elevate

Feeling stretched thin by a thousand small tasks? Let’s talk about using the leverage of delegation. We pull apart the myths that keep smart people stuck like “it’s faster if I do it,” “no one can match my quality,” “I don’t have time to teach” and replace them with a simple, practical system that frees your focus for high-impact work.

 With finite time, energy, and attention, the only way to scale your results is to move repeatable, low-value tasks off your plate and keep the work that truly demands your expertise. You’ll learn how to apply the 80 percent rule to pick the right starting point, why documenting once can save you hours every week, and how tools like Loom (Loom.com)  make it easy to create easily reusable training. 

We challenge you to choose a repeatable task and delegate it today. Keep your highest and best use work and let the rest go with intention. 

Please subscribe for more practical systems to maximize your time and elevate your life and share this with a teammate who needs to up their delegation game.  If you want more in-depth resources, you can contact Blinn at his websites below.  

Blinn Bates - BlinnBates.com

Woods & Bates, P.C. - Woodsandbates.com

Right Fit Evaluator: https://blinnbates.com/right-fit-evaluator

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Delegation Feels Hard
• 0:50 Time, Energy, And Highest Use
• 1:25 The 80 Percent Rule And Team Growth
• 1:53 Where To Start Delegating
• 2:31 Systems, Checklists, And Loom
• 3:08 Keep What Requires Your Expertise
• 3:30 How To Delegate Tasks Well
• 4:45 Trust, Verify, And Resist Reclaiming
• 5:16 One-Task Challenge And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:00

Welcome back. I want to talk to you today about delegation. If you're feeling constantly overwhelmed, you're buried in the details of things. If you feel like you're the only one that can get things done, think delegation is going to be your solution that you haven't embraced yet. Now, this isn't about giving up control. It's about elevating your effectiveness and using your leverage. So the truth about delegation is that it's one of the highest leverage skills any business professional has available to them. Most people, though, resist it. We tell ourselves lies, things like it's faster if I do it myself, nobody can do it as well as I can. I don't have time to explain it to someone else. I can tell you from experience that I've been there too. I've said these things and I believe these things to a point. But believing these things and having these limiting beliefs is going to, in the long run, cost us far more than the time that it's going to cost us in the short run to train others to do these tasks. And this delegation isn't necessarily a sign of weakness, it's just a strategy for our growth. So we only have, as we've discussed, a finite amount of time. We only have a finite amount of attention. We have a finite amount of energy. And every task that we're holding on to is preventing us from focusing on what's our highest and best use. Strategic thinking, maybe, uh serving clients at a higher level, having the time to spend on the file that I need to, growing the business, growing the career, growing the side hustle, whatever that might be, when you're doing tasks and activities that could be delegated that somebody else could do, you're holding yourself back. So the rule of thumb that I've heard over and over again is if somebody else can do it at 80% as well as you can do it, then you should be delegating it. And this is about efficiency and it's about developing other people as well because it builds your capacity and it strengthens the team that you have placed around you and gives you more independence to do the things that you actually enjoy. Frees you to work in what they call the zone of genius. Now that's a whole different podcast for another day, but these are the things that you enjoy doing. And if you can wake up every day and do the things that you enjoy doing, you have won. So where do I start? Easy place to start is delegating tasks that are of low value to you, maybe high value to somebody else. This could be things for me personally, like scheduling, uh, calendaring, email, routine processes like this. These are tasks that are repeatable, they happen often. We do them over and over and over again, and they're very easy to create systems around. So I can teach somebody this is how we need to be making the appointment. We need the name, the telephone number, you know, where where the appointment's going to be, the address, etc. And if you can do it, you can teach it. You document it once and then you can delegate it forever, really. One of the tools that I've used and I've come across is a program called Loom. And so that records your screen as you're doing the task. You can talk just like I'm talking right now. It records that, and then someone can watch that video over and over as a training module to learn how to do the task. It's been pretty great. It's called Loom. Now, if you're doing tasks that maybe are not your highest and best use, you could ask yourself, is this the best use of my time? And if it's no, then let's delegate it. Let's keep the tasks that require our expertise. So, for instance, there's things in my world where you have to be a licensed attorney to give legal advice. Those are things that I really can't delegate unless I'm delegating it to another licensed attorney. They require some sort of confidentiality, so I can't talk about it. And we want to keep things that are tying to our strengths, not things that we could give somebody else to do. There's very much different levels of delegation, and that again is something I want to get into in more depth at a later episode. But how to delegate well depends on the type of delegation you're doing. If we're just doing task delegation, we want to define the outcome for people. We want to say this is what done looks like, and we want to be specific about the result, maybe not necessarily the method. We want to provide tools to that person, context, explain to them why we're doing what we're doing, maybe give them some templates, some examples. Here's how I've done it in the past, here's a checklist, that type of thing. And then we want to set an expectation. So we want to say this needs to be done by X date. And when it's done, we need to have a quality standard, what it's supposed to look like, how and when to check in, if it's a longer project, something like that. That's not just a one and done type deal. And then, you know, it gets into what decisions can they make with you. We want to trust but verify, let them do the work, but maybe they need to be checking in with us every week, every two weeks to make sure that it's going the way it needs to be going, so that we can coach that also. And one of the biggest temptations is to take that back. You know, if it's not going exactly the way we want it, we can take it back, and that has ruined the whole purpose of trying to delegate it. So correction is good, uh, coaching is good, and that's good not only for the person that's learning, but for the person that's teaching. And this is a muscle. The more we use it, the stronger it's gonna get, the better we are going to get at it, and the more we can delegate. So I challenge you today to choose one task that you've been hanging on to that somebody else could do, even if it's at 80% of the level that you could do it, and delegate it this week. Give clear direction, set the expectation, let it go, and follow up. Your job is not going to be to do everything, your job is gonna be to ensure that everything is getting done. So delegate with intention, uh, use your leverage. That's how you're gonna maximize your time and elevate your life.