Peter Sorgenfrei talks to founders and CEOs about delegating work and building team autonomy. He walks through how to identify tasks and owners, accept that people will execute at 70 or 60 percent at first, and let them learn by doing rather than controlling every move.
For many founders, CEOs, it comes very natural to kind of step in and take control of the situation and decide what happens next. What's the narrative? How are we going to do this? I certainly end up doing that a lot of times, and I know many of the people that I work with struggle with this. So instead of jumping in and coming up with the answers, try this next time. Try to identify the tasks that need to be done, the people who need to do them, and kind of calculate, okay, what is the risk that if Susan does this 70% of the way or Bob does this 60% of the way, what are we going to lose versus what are we going to lose if I don't let them have that experience, don't let them try and do something? Realize it wasn't necessarily the 100% solution, adjust along the way, and fix it later. That's the only way to build confidence in your team, is actually letting them go down a path even though you know that it may not be the perfect one, but giving them that autonomy. And as founder CEOs, that is sometimes very difficult. So I encourage you to practice it the next time you have the opportunity.
