Part 1: How You’re Delegating Wrong
Delegation isn’t just about handing off tasks – it’s about handing off decisions.
Many business owners equate delegation with simply handing off tasks, thinking that as long as someone else is doing the work, they’re effectively delegating.
Nope.
While helpful, task-based delegation still leaves a significant burden on the business owner because they must constantly make decisions, give detailed instructions, and monitor the work.
You’re still at the centre of every operation, which leads to bottlenecks and leaves little time for high-level strategic thinking OR the creative flow that you love doing.
Enter decision-based delegation.
This approach involves bringing someone on who cannot only execute tasks but also think critically, make decisions, and solve problems the way you would—or even better.
Decision-based delegation is about trusting your team to take ownership of their work, freeing you up from the cognitive load of micromanaging every detail.
Delegating tasks might help you get things done, but decision-based delegation helps you level up. It’s the difference between having a team that works for you and you being their MANAGER, and having a team that works with you and you being their LEADER.
Let’s dive a little bit deeper into this execution-based delegation, or what I refer to as the do-ey (as in doing the thing) versus a decision-based delegation, or what I can call the think-ey.
Delegation has different levels of how an individual (a person doing the thing) or a business unit (a group of people working on a thing – sales, marketing, ops, etc) contributes to the overall business ecosystem.
I call this The Contribution Pyramid™.
The first two levels of this pyramid are concerned with execution, the actual doing of the things.
Tasks: What does a person or business unit have to do? What needs to be completed? Day to day, day in, day out, what are we doing?
Process: How are tasks connecting together to execute or implement?
The top two levels of the pyramid are all about decisions and the impact that those decisions have on the business.
Outcome: What is the result of these processes being successfully completed? What is being created or what can be true?
Value: The impact that these outcomes have on the livelihood, the profitability, and the reputation of my business. How will I know we are successful? What will I see when things are working? This is now a value question.
Let’s talk about how this impacts the hiring thought process.
When we hire based on execution-based delegation or someone who is just doing your current actions, you’re operating at the first level of the pyramid.
When you hire someone for this type of work, the meetings and conversations with this person often revolve around, what are you doing? Is this done? Can you go do this? What about this? This wasn’t done correctly. Can you go do this?
Then hopefully over time, once you have some more things that are not on your plate, you have this person operating at a task level, that person will either grow into or you start hiring for levels two, three, and four of this pyramid.
More often than not, especially for neurodivergent folks like me, the decisions are actually the things that take the most time and energy and the things that also have the largest impact on the health of the business.
Think-ey can be harder than the do-ey, at least in my world.
It doesn’t really matter if you have really great SOPs.
I know a lot of folks out there say that you need to have all of these in place before you hire and they’re soon effective. To me, that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t impact as much as the types of delegation you’re doing because even with SOPs, you’re still talking about a task level, maybe a process level, way of delegation.
That still leaves you all of these other things up here to manage, oversee, and decide on. This is why when you bring in help and it’s actually added to your plate–not taking things off of it–because you still have to do the mental heavy lifting and guide the person doing the actual execution. It can be a lot.
On the flip side, we do have decision-based delegation.
In this world–this is the world that I live in–I hire based on level four, and I leave levels three, two, and one up to them.
When you can create an environment where someone understands your brain, what is valuable to you, the business, the goals, the strategies, then they get to take their own experience, their own skills, their perspective to decide the rest of it.
Now the conversation has shifted with this person because instead of me talking to them and asking, “What are you doing? Is this done? Can you go do this?” It’s how are customers feeling? How are we tracking against our goals? What do you suggest happens next? How will we know if the business is successful?
In this model of decision-based delegation, I’m not managing them at a task level.
I am managing them at a value and outcome level because how they do it is irrelevant to me. That’s where their genius comes in. That sounds hard. It can be.
It can take longer to hire in this way.
It can require more effort. It definitely requires a lot more thought on your part. It requires trust in this person that you’ve hired and everybody working collectively to build that trust. It can mean paying people more. In the long run, this style of hiring and delegation can be much more effective and give you the relief that you seek from day one instead of waiting to hire multiple people down the road at some future point.
