In my bubblegum pink bedroom, I was slipping in and out of consciousness while reading my US History textbook and taking notes. Groggily, I woke to re-read what I wrote. In my half-asleep state, I must have been dreaming I was responding to myYearbook members. I had written down instructions for changing their myYearbook password and thanked them for joining as if I were responding to messages.
In the early days of myYearbook, I responded to every single message my account received. Sometimes, I would have ongoing conversations with people but usually answered account queries. It all eventually got to be too much. A good problem to have: the site was doing well, and as we grew, my “Catherine” account received a ton of messages.
In the fall of my senior year of high school, member services began responding to messages for me. I felt so uncomfortable giving up this responsibility.
Delegating is uncomfortable. It’s also necessary.
“I should delegate more” is a frequent refrain from leaders. According to an executive coaching survey conducted by Stanford University, over ⅓ of CEOs say delegating is something they need to improve.
Delegating is difficult for a few reasons:
“It’s better if I do it.”
When you delegate a task, you give up control of it. That means if it is done wrong, you’re still accountable. One of the main barriers to delegating is fully letting go of the task and not micromanaging.
Delegating also requires an upfront time investment. To delegate, you must first teach someone the task you are delegating. Depending on how difficult it is, that is very time-consuming. In addition to that time-consuming upfront investment, there is fear that the other person will do it wrong.
The “self-enhancement bias” is the belief that the more highly you are involved, the higher the quality of the work (despite identical work). Letting go of control is uncomfortable, but to delegate, you must put aside that feeling.
In Emily Oster’s discussion of Total Responsibility Transfer, which is the concept that if someone is going to take over a task, they must take over all aspects of the task (planning, prep, execution, etc.), she discusses that a barrier many people hit is the inability to give up control of the activity. If a partner has full responsibility for a task like dinner, you cannot then nitpick it by asking them to change it up. When I load the dishwasher, Drew doesn’t complain that I don’t load it the way he wants it even though sometimes he thinks (correctly) that I’m purposefully trolling him.
Delegating is the same. If you hand over a task, you cannot then micromanage it. You need to give it up and trust your team fully. There were some messages I would see in my account that were not answered the same way I would have answered them. For most of them, it didn’t matter, and I recognized that I was so happy not to have that task on my plate. In the rare times when I thought it mattered, I gave some feedback.
Doing something differently is not doing something incorrectly.
To help overcome this challenge, in the initial task transfer, it’s important to establish the goals or KPIs to work within. Having communicated expectations holds everyone accountable.
“I like it.”
Another challenge with delegating is when you like what you’re working on. I used to enjoy running performance marketing campaigns at TMG very much. I liked talking with and connecting to partners, changing the bids, and experimenting with different creative, CTAs, and copy. I genuinely enjoyed that aspect of my job.
As we grew and my attention was pulled to other elements, I didn’t have the bandwidth to update creative at the cadence necessary for the campaigns.
Jade was also asking to take on more and more of the performance spend. I remember the uneasiness in my stomach years ago when, in our one-on-one, we decided Jade would take over MeetMe’s biggest partner. I had no qualms about handing over any campaigns to her. She managed every partner exceedingly well. I was worried about what that meant for my role. That was a part of my day I enjoyed.
I did recognize that my and Jade’s growth depended on me relinquishing those responsibilities. There was no reason for me to be managing the campaigns.
What you need to delegate isn’t necessarily the tedious task you just wish you didn’t have to do. Often, it’s just things that someone on the team could do better so that you can focus on something else.
When figuring out what to delegate, it’s essential to look at what you do on a given day – write it down. Once you know where your time is going, it becomes easier to see what should be removed (even if it’s something you like!)
Without managing the day-to-day campaigns, I could work on other areas and enjoyed my role even more. Knowing the campaigns were taken care of, I could focus on other priorities.
3) “They’re too busy.”
Another challenge to delegating is when the whole team seems just as busy. With the messages from my account, I felt guilty handing it over. In the email asking them to take it over, I cited that my schedule was picking up with college applications and gymnastics meets, and I was struggling to keep up. I felt like the reasons I couldn’t keep up were so silly.
In retrospect, neither of those is silly for a high schooler to need to do, but I didn’t feel comfortable giving the work. Our member services team was also busy.
But, just because they are busy doesn’t mean you can’t delegate. It means that you need to look at your priorities and others’ priorities and likely remove some, hire someone, or create more time in the day by making some organizational changes, like better meeting management or email-free times.
Eventually, we decided it didn’t make sense to upkeep the responsiveness from my main account. The volume of messages was just too great, and most just said, “Hey.” So, we communicated on the profile that the profile doesn’t respond and where to direct questions. I would sometimes go in and respond to people occasionally if my chats would load (usually there were too many); the members I responded to were always so happy! Still, trying to respond to everything was a losing battle.
Another thing to keep in mind if your team is busy is that you don’t always have to delegate down. The go-to assumption is to delegate you offload tasks onto a direct report, but there are other ways.
In my message example, it’s clear that the member services team would have the most experience with user questions, and it makes sense that they own the help desk aspect. Similarly, when I went on maternity leave, I needed to find someone to cover sending out a marketing message to users. I was the only one on my team familiar with the tool required to send those, but video team members also used it. Instead of adding it to responsibilities for my team while I was on leave, I prepared all of the copy ahead of time and asked someone on a completely different team to send out the messaging as they understood the tool, too.
Delegating is essential for your growth (and potentially sanity) and your teams.’ Identify the leading cause of why you are struggling to delegate to help you find solutions to be more comfortable. Are you afraid of letting go of control? Sad to let a beloved part of your role go? Or don’t see a pathway because everyone on your team is just as busy as you? Diagnose the problem so you and your team can come up with solutions.