How Smart Leaders Get More Done Without Doing More

If managing your new hire feels like more work than just doing things yourself, and no matter how many tasks you delegate, it feels like you are always drowning in work, then this video is for you. Today I'm going to be sharing the one shift that I have learned over six years of hiring and firing dozens of employees that fixes this issue once and for all. What we need to do is stop delegating these inside our business and instead delegate this. Wait, no, the coffee's just for me. No, we need to delegate these instead areas. Let me explain. You see, task delegation is about assigning specific actions you want somebody to do, typically at a specific time. For example, I could hire Mariah to add YouTube timestamps every Wednesday. This kind of delegation is where everybody starts. And if you only have freelancers or contractors on your team, this might be where your process stops. However, as you become more advanced and you add employees to your team, this kind of task based delegation is not going to work. For example, let's take these scenarios. Let's say there's a mistake in the YouTube timestamp, something just got off, or maybe there's a new course you want to add to the YouTube description. You created this course called Task Plunger to help people delegate, which is free in the description below, and you want to get it added into retroactive YouTube descriptions. Or maybe there's a new trend or best practice in your industry, like maybe everybody wants to add gifts of dancing lobsters in the YouTube description and that is a hot trend you don't want to miss. In each of these scenarios, you need things to be done that are related to Mariah's tasks, but they're not what you assigned her. So the only way she's going to know that she needs to do these things is if you tell her. You're going to need to tell her there's a mistake and hey, go fix it. You're going to have to tell her, hey, go add this course here or you're going to have to do the research, learn the trend, explain the trend to Mariah and hope that she implements it. In all of these cases, you are becoming the bottleneck. You're still involved in this area of the business even though you delegated it. And in fact, because you're not doing it day, it might actually feel harder to jump in just for these little exceptions than it would be if you just did the whole thing yourself. This is why we want to go with areas instead. When we talk about areas, we want to take sections of our business and Assign responsibility, assign ownership to an individual. In this case, that might look like Mariah owns YouTube descriptions. So while in task land, we're just dealing with one little container and Mariah is just in charge of that. We, when we define an area, this includes all potential exceptions, changes, and shifts that could happen that at all relate to that area of ownership. This subtle shift can make a huge difference for two reasons. One, when these unexpected things come up, Mariah now knows she is responsible for them because she owns that entire area. So I don't have to as the person delegating, I don't have to predict every possible task. I need to just assign over the zones of responsibility those areas, and I know that my people will know where they need to go and what they're responsible for. The second benefit is the amount of brain space this frees up for me as the manager. When these kinds of issues happen, I'm not getting pulled in to redelegate them. I don't need to be involved at all because now they occur. Anyone could notice them, and they go right to the relevant person. And in this case of the trends where we're keeping on top of things, that's not my responsibility to keep up on anymore. I don't have to know the latest trends around YouTube descriptions. Mariah does in this case. So I am no longer a bottleneck, a middleman, a delegator, having to get involved in this area at all because I've assigned ownership of a whole section to a person. And, you know, one of the most beautiful things about this whole shift is that to really make it happen, all we're doing is changing a few words inside our job descriptions. So Mariah owns YouTube timestamps or Mariah owns YouTube descriptions. By shifting just a few words in a job description, we. We make sure that things that come up, that are unexpected, which are guaranteed to happen at some point, don't end up on our plate, which makes delegation actually feel like delegation. But wait, there's more. God, that was cheesy. If you're a bit more advanced and you want to fix this delegation trap, not just for specific parts of your business, but for the entire business, here's a pro tip for you. Start working backwards. Let me quickly go through a visual to show you what I mean. In this video, I've talked about going from your normal way of thinking of tasks and instead thinking about areas of responsibility. And this is a great next step. But one thing I've noticed is as you add more and more areas of responsibility, most people miss spots, they forget about tasks entirely or sections of their business. And so these unprotected zones become, you guessed it, your problem and this your problem red area can become very big, especially when you're a newer team. So for the ninja approach to the same exercise, I like to work backwards. And rather than go from tasks to areas like we did over here, I like to go from the overall business view, break that into areas, and only once I start defining those areas do I actually go through and add tasks inside each of the areas. By going through this approach and making sure that every spot in your business has a name, has a title, has an area, you can then intentionally decide, all right, which of these bricks, which of these areas is going to be a your problem zone. And it's not something you find out because oh gosh, no one else knows how to do this and no one else is covering it. It's something you plan from the get go at the Thousand Foot view. Now this second exercise is definitely more advanced, but when we work with clients to systemize their operations inside process driven foundations, this is our go to exercise and something we've implemented for more than 1900 teams. So if this is something you'd be interested in for your business, check out the link in the description below for how you can work with us to make this happen. And if you enjoyed this video, write the word tip in the comments below. That will act as a vote. And if we get enough votes on this video, we'll make this quick tips type of video a series so you can get more content just like this. So write tip in the comments. If you'd like to see more or you find yourself with some time to kill, you might find it helpful to get an overview of what systemizing your business actually means. And that's exactly what I cover on this next video here on the end screen. And as always, no matter what you do next, remember to enjoy the process.