Sorry people, between having a newborn and launching my new weekly Internet show “Outside the Inbox”, I have let my blogging schedule for jaredreitzin.com go by the wayside. I didn’t leave ya! I still plan to continue to address important situations and subjects that all of us budding entrepreneurs must face. This week I want to talk about delegation. As easy as it sometimes seems to just say, “Hey, John, I want you to take this project over,” it’s not. Here are the four main reasons why this isn’t as easy as it seems:

Scenario 1: If you are a business owner, you realize that nobody in your company can do a job as well as you can. As a result, you never delegate and will always assign yourself the task at hand.

Scenario 2: You are so busy that you don’t have time to train someone to do it, and because of your attitude (see #1 above), you would just rather get it done quickly by yourself.

Scenario 3: You don’t have any project management procedures in place, coupled with follow-through habits, so even if you delegate a task to someone, you haven’t put any milestones or deadlines in place, and things will eventually slip through the cracks.

Scenario 4: You don’t have a lot of people you can delegate to because you are small and are just starting out.

Scenario 5: Is there a 5th one you can think of?

Delegation is one of those incredibly important skill sets to have as a CEO. The smartest CEOs in the world aren’t usually the engineers of the company, they usually aren’t the best public speakers, and they surely don’t have the most knowledge of the company’s intellectual property. They surround themselves with people who can do what they themselves can’t, then they delegate. Don’t get me wrong–I am not trying to use the phrase “teachers teach,” because a CEO has to be a jack-of-all-trades and needs to master the art of being a chameleon. CEOs need to be able to at least grasp concepts so they can help make educated decisions. They must also find the right people and motivate, motivate, motivate.

The only way to truly expand a business is to be able to find and hire the right people, then delegate their goals to them and make sure they hit those goals. It is so important you learn the art of delegation as quickly as possible. CEOs who have the Scenario 1 issue need to stop and ask themselves one simple question: “If I really spend time training this person, will he or she ever be able to do this task, and if so, how long would it take him or her to learn?”. If the answer is never, you need to either fire that person and find someone new or start thinking about who else in your company could manage this task.

At the end of the day, it is your job as the CEO to have group managers report back to you as to how their departments are performing. As you start to get bigger and bigger, this becomes a reality. I find myself spending less time selling these days and a lot more time on financial projections, building our next generation platform, public relations, marketing and branding. The tasks I used to have time for, I don’t anymore, but those tasks didn’t go away.

For Scenario 2 CEOs, have you heard the expression, “Take one step back, two steps forward.”? This is the perfect analogy for simply taking the time to train a competent person. Sure it’s tough because you have so much going on and you could do it faster, but damn it, if you don’t teach someone else, you are going be doing this task for the rest of your life! Take a step back and show a competent person (competent being paramount here) how it is done. Your one step back is the time it takes to train someone; your two steps forward is that you can now delegate that project/task in the future to someone else.

So let’s say you get good at handing things off to people. You love it so much that you keep delegating more and more tasks and soon you have more projects spinning than any one man can handle, but that’s the beautiful part about delegation–more than one man can handle. However, CEOs just don’t bark orders and expect them to be done; they are managers and need to manage. Scenario 3 is the pitfall of so many CEO entrepreneurs. You can never expect someone working for you to always get the job done right and on time. Even the most dedicated and talented employees still don’t have your mentality. This is your baby, and you are always going take the best care of it. With that in mind, it is very important that you establish project management procedures. Some people like using software like Basecamp or Microsoft Project. Personally, because of how fast-paced our company is, we use good old-fashioned Excel. There isn’t one project or task someone has that does not get written down into his “Project Status Update” file, along with a due date. We keep the milestones simple: “First draft, second draft, final draft, manager x approval, launch.” All of these milestones would have a due date. You better believe that I am looking over my managers’ task lists on a daily basis and asking them how their progress is coming along. If they aren’t hitting deadlines, I am asking them why and trying to figure out a way that this won’t happen again. If they continue to miss deadlines, I put them on review and these reviews could affect salaries when raises come around. Think of this as a tennis match–you hit the ball to someone and he had better hit it back or he just posted a point to you. You have to make sure that he or she hits that ball back and that the ball is exactly how your manager said it was going to be.

The fourth and final scenario is a common one at this stage. One of the biggest issues is that everyone is so overloaded with work that even if they could do a good job with a new project, they don’t have the time to take it on. So being a good prioritizer is important here. Ask yourself if this project is monumental and must be done right away, or if you can put it on the back burner until someone’s time frees up.

Or you can be like me and come into the office on a Sunday when nobody is there, turn up the house music really loud, blow a fan in your face because the building turns A/C off on Sunday, and try to get as much of it done as possible because, hey, at the end of the day, you own the biggest piece, right?

Jared Reitzin
www.jaredreitzin.com