It’s that time of year again. Time to reflect on the past twelve months and set our sights on the coming year. If you’re like most company leaders, you probably have no shortage of new ideas and goals for your business. But while new ideas are only important if you have time implement and follow through with them.

So here is the twist. This post isn’t about your resolutions — it’s about delegation. I want you to work on better delegation this year so that you can free your time for what matters most in your life.

Some Upfront Assumptions About Delegation

This post assumes you have the following already worked out with yourself and your company:

1. Your Impossible Dream goals
2. The company Revenue Blueprint
3. Your personal values and your company’s core values as a touchstone for behavior
4. Basic decision-making tools and guidance
5. Strong meeting formats that drive decisions and action plans
6. The right people doing the right things
7. A process like OKRs for measuring momentum

If you don’t have these in place — or know what I’m talking about here — you need to contact us immediately. I’m not kidding. These things are foundational to proper delegation. Without proper delegation, you will continue to wear too many hats in your company and become your own choke point on growth. All decisions will flow through you. All tasks will wait your approval. Without delegation, your growth will be limited by what you can do, not by the talent of your team.

Delegation Leads to Better Long-term Results

Don’t be afraid to let go. You cannot do everything yourself. When you have the seven items above well-defined and communicated, you will be pleasantly surprised to learn that most of your company’s tasks function better without your involvement. That’s right, letting go produces better results. The people in your organization have great ideas about how to accomplish more. They are closer to the playing field than you are, closer to the day-to-day. They will have different solutions than you will, and that’s a good thing.

Your team will make mistakes. You should encourage them to make mistakes because A-players learn from those mistakes and they grow as individuals. Delegation enriches your employees in skill, trust and teamwork. That allows you to delegate even more in the future.

What Should Be Delegated?

Have you assigned roles and responsibilities based on your Revenue Blueprint? If so, it should become obvious where accountabilities lie in each of the most important areas of your company.

Your personal focus should be on the biggest goals of the year, the next five years, the next ten years. Your focus should not be on the daily work that moves smaller objectives. Then learn to see yourself as the chief advisor, not driver. Allow others to drive so you can focus on the big picture. You need to keep your hand on the biggest levers in the organization and let other pull the smaller levers.

Some of my clients are top-down thinkers. in fact, most company leaders I work with are highly intuitive and starting with the big picture makes the most sense for them. You can work with us to match your goals and company functions to your Revenue Blueprint to get a clearer picture of the goals and sub-tasks it takes to move forward with growth as well as keep your current clients happy.

Other people are more bottom-up thinkers. If this is you, it may be helpful to start with your typical day and list out the takes in front of you and others. Again, go through each section of your Revenue Blueprint — preferably with the people accountable for those areas — and list out the most important tasks and goals.

I then want you to do two things. First, ask yourself where you are currently involved in those processes and why. Is it difficult for your staff to make decisions in certain areas? Do you possess some knowledge or experience necessary for the job and you haven’t passed it on yet? If so, we need to work on putting systems in place for decisions, meetings and accountability as well as some training systems.

Second, there will be some items on your list that you’ve always done or you enjoy doing. You must ask yourself the tough questions: can someone else do this job better and is this the best use of my time?

I want you to seriously think about removing as much as possible from your plate this year. Innovation and vision-building take focus and without it your company cannot grow beyond your current run rates. You need to dedicate your time to these areas and let others grow in their own areas.

Delegation: How It Should Work

OK, if I’ve convinced you that delegation is the best way to grow your company and your team, you’re probably wondering how to get started. Here’s your checklist:

1. Does the employee have the 3Ps of accountability in your Enterprise Velocity planning? If not, work on helping them with their skills or bandwidth.
2. Have you given the employee a decision-making framework and the authority to carry out the job you want to delegate? It’s not good delegating if they must come back and ask you questions or seek your final approval. And you’ll miss the opportunity to build trust among your team and develop new leaders.
3. Do you have systems in place to manage goals and action items? In Enterprise Velocity this means company goals, OKRs, measurement and regular meeting cadences to track action items.
4. Are your expected results crystal clear? This is why I advocate for OKRs, so that you goals and actions are tied to key results. Worry about outcomes, not inputs. If the employee understands what the end result needs to look like, allow them the freedom to take new and interesting paths to get there.
5. Be prepared to reward success. Too many fast-moving companies forget to celebrate their successes. Make a calendar reminder for yourself to celebrate others and what they’ve accomplished so you don’t forget. It’s easy to just assume that your A-players will succeed and forget to reward them.

Delegation is a critical skill for any business owner or manager. When done correctly, delegation can help you grow your company by freeing up your time to work on more important tasks. However, when done incorrectly — or worse, not at all — delegation can hinder growth and cause problems within your company. In order to ensure that delegation helps your business grow, you must first understand the basics of effective delegation.

Let go of the things that don’t matter this year so you can focus on what matters most.