EP # 220 - From Doing It All to Leading It All. How to Delegate Like a Pro

Feeling like you're drowning in your own business success? If you're trying to do everything yourself, you're not just burning out - you're actually holding your business back from real growth.

In this episode, I'm breaking down the biggest myths that keep business owners stuck in "do-it-all" mode and sharing the exact framework I use to help clients go from overwhelmed solopreneurs to confident CEOs leading thriving teams.

What we cover:

• Why being "irreplaceable" in your business is actually a trap
• The 5 biggest fears that stop business owners from delegating (and how to overcome each one)
• My personal story of learning to delegate as a young supervisor
• Why "they won't do it as well as me" is usually about control, not quality
• The 5 principles of effective delegation that actually work
• How one client went from doing everything to enjoying library time with her kids while her team handled a major project

The delegation myths we're busting:

• "There are no good people out there" (there are)
• "I can't afford help" (can you afford NOT to get help?)
• "I don't know how to manage people" (it's a learnable skill)

This isn't about giving up control - it's about gaining the freedom to focus on what only you can do while building a business that can thrive without you being tied to it 24/7.

Ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own business? This episode will show you exactly how to start. And if you want to work with Maggie, book a consultation call at https://stairwaytoleadership.com/

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] As your business is growing and you find yourself busy trying to do it all, you might be starting to think about delegating, delegating some of the tasks, whether to other professionals, whether you're thinking about hiring a team member. Or maybe you already have a team in place and now you're trying to figure out what to delegate to who.

Delegation is a key skill in any business owner leader who wants to grow not only their own business, but as themselves. This topic has been inspired by one of my clients whose business is growing really well, and she's now thinking about delegating certain tasks to other people.

And as most of us, when we first learn how to delegate, she has a lot of thoughts about it.

Do. The way I think about delegation might be a little bit different to what you might be thinking right now, and we'll definitely bust the myths or limiting beliefs that many business owners have in the [00:01:00] beginning. But let me share first what I think about delegation and how I came to it through my own story.

So the way I think about delegation is that it's an opportunity for you to grow as a leader of your business by freeing your schedule. By delegating tasks that maybe you don't like doing, that are taking way too much time and can be done better by somebody else, and then freeing that time and energy and space in your calendar for you to focus on things that are, might be more exciting, that are more important to growth of your business, things that you might actually love.

Doing. And the other way I think about delegation is also a way to empower your people once you have a team to learn new things, to motivate them, to make [00:02:00] them stay with your company because they have a path of progression. Most people and especially great people. Love to learn. They love to grow.

So any time you can delegate something to them, it's an opportunity for them to learn. And I've seen that in my best employees as a corporate leader. I've seen many of my clients come from very limiting beliefs about delegation and leading people to actually loving their team, loving to be the leader, people leader, and delegating things because they see the benefits of it.

When I was promoted for the very first time to be a young supervisor, I had a number of responsibilities I quickly realized that the list of responsibilities was growing because the business I was in was. Growing as well.

There were also [00:03:00] things that I wanted to learn because I love to learn and grow, but at some point I didn't have even capacity to do that because of my responsibilities. So very quickly I figured out that if I start involving. My team members who were skilled and were eager to learn in things that maybe I don't wanna do anymore because I've done them and I know them in and out, and my brain wanted to learn something else.

Whenever I taught them new things and delegated those tasks to them, I created space. In my schedule and also in my capacity to learn new things. And what that did to me as a manager, as a leader in a corporate world, it kept my team members engaged because they were excited to learn new things

responsibilities of the role that they were aspiring to get to, and I was being [00:04:00] involved in projects and things that excited me and also allowed me to progress. So I was never tied. To the rule, and I was the only one who could do it because then when you're in a corporate world, it prevents you from possibly being promoted when you become irreplaceable.

But even as the owner of your business, you do not want to be irreplaceable. In your business because then that ties you to your business 24 7. This is when you get into the trap where you can't take a weekend off. You can't take holidays with your family because your business cannot function without you, and as your business grows, you want to avoid that.

Not to mention that you'll never turn your business into a sellable asset if it cannot function without you, a new owner needs to be able to buy a business and run it by following the [00:05:00] structure, the processes and systems you set up, and keep being profitable for your business to have value.

So let's first go through thoughts or. Limiting beliefs that very often business owners have, and I wanna give you my perspective on those and bus those myths a little bit to then help you start thinking that maybe you are ready to delegate some time and free your time to focus more on other things in your business where you can have bigger impact.

One of the most predominant beliefs, I hear from business owners is that there are no good people out there, and I wanna call it BS from my experience of hiring people for over 13 years. Going through thousands of resumes, doing hundreds of interviews, and having hired [00:06:00] probably over a hundred plus people in my career.

I've always was able to find good and great people, and those people came from different generations, from the youngest generations through the oldest generation in the workforce, from different backgrounds, experienced people, less experienced people, I was always able to find great people.

Now, that does not mean that it's easy to find those people and there is a lot of them, but it's possible to find them. They're out there and it just requires for you to build the skillset of hiring people. And even my clients who work with me discover that, and they come from different geographical areas, different type of businesses, different industries.

Some of them hire full-time employees, some of them hire contractors or freelance [00:07:00] workers. Younger people, mid aged people, does not matter. Clients who have worked with me found that there is always great people they find and they actually love their teams. So there are great people out there. But your job as a leader of your business is to learn how to attract them and how to find them.

Now, we don't have a lot of time in this episode for me to go into details with it, but I did record an episode back in the day. It's episode number 46, called Preparing to Hire Your First Help from May 20th. Year 2022, where I talk a little bit more about it. So we can definitely refer to that resource.

The second thing that I often hear business owners tell me is that but even if I hire people, they're not going to do as good of a job as. I am doing, and again, I do not [00:08:00] agree with that. Usually the things you wanna delegate is the things that you're not so great at that are challenging for you, that are taking you a long time or you just hate doing.

So when we don't like to do something. Even if we are skilled at doing it, the outcome of our work won't be the greatest because our brain resists it. We don't have access to our best skillset when we're just not enjoying the thing. But often you want to start with delegating things that are just not your genius zone, and you want to focus on your genius zone.

So let's say bookkeeping or some administrative tasks. So then of course you want to hire a professional in those tasks you're trying to outsource, who actually not only love to do them, but very often be much better than you and the quality of the task and the [00:09:00] effectiveness, and they will be able to complete it much faster.

Now what I find is the thought of, oh, they're not going to do as good as a job as mine. Very often underneath. What's actually hiding is they're not going to do the exact same way as I'm doing it, and I want to control the way they're doing it. And I want you to be honest with yourself if that's really what's behind.

This initial thought of, oh, they're not gonna do as good of a job. I remember when I was a teenager and my parents were divorced, so whenever we came to visit my dad, me and my sister, he would ask us to do little chores for him and help him out in the home.

Dishwashers were not a thing that in Polish household was a custom or normal, more normal, appliance. [00:10:00] We were washing dishes manually, and I started washing dishes the way I would with my mom, and my dad didn't like it, and he was trying to get me to wash dishes his way, even though the outcome and the result of what he wanted would've been clean dishes.

And we got into this big fight because my dad was trying to control the way I was doing it rather than just. Looking at the result, whether it met his standards or not, to just ask yourself whenever you're hiring and we'll talk about how to hire, is, does the, a person I'm hiring, do they really have to do the things?

Do they really have to do the task the exact same way as I am doing to get to the same result? Or are there multiple ways to get to the same result? And I can leave them a bit [00:11:00] of agency to do it the best way they think or they know how to. So that result that I get is what I want. And sometimes, and most often than not, you'll be actually surprised how much better they.

Get to the result or how much better the result is because you left them a bit of agency and freedom to do it. I was always surprised by my own employees getting the same or better results just because I allowed them to be them and to be creative.

Now there might be times where an employee needs to follow a certain process.

And when that's a necessity. I'm not saying here that. Don't train the employee on the process that they need to follow. All I'm suggesting is that whenever possible, let the employees be creative and just [00:12:00] focus on the result that you want, not necessarily on how they're getting there. The third objection I often hear from business owners when they're resisting delegation is, but my business is my baby, and I build it.

And there is this fear of losing control and not knowing what is going to happen with the task that they delegate. And that really comes from a couple of things, not knowing what the delegation is in, a bit of wanting to control. And control issues. So here's the thing. Delegating a task does not mean losing control.

You don't get to just give somebody the task and forget it about entirely, right? You still need to communicate with them, check on the result, discuss certain things so you're not losing control. You are just not doing the task. The second thing is that, [00:13:00] yes, maybe your business is your baby, but if you have children, you know that they're also better off when they start interacting with other people and with other professionals.

Who love them and take care of them. Like when you send your child to daycare or you have a nanny, or you send them to school and they get to interact and learn from their teachers and they meet friends and so on. And you do that because you trust that these people have the best interests of your child in mind.

It's the same. When you delegate tasks and you build your team, when you know how to hire great people, they will have the best interest of your business in mind, and they will want it to succeed, and your business will benefit from their skillset. You will benefit from having help from having more than just your brain thinking and figuring out [00:14:00] how to make your business more successful.

The fourth fear that I see business owners have is, oh, I can't afford it, or I'm not sure I can afford it. Of course, there's financial considerations. It's not always, you can hire help right away, especially if you still have time and skillset to do certain things in your business. However, when you are noticing that the.

Moneymaking activities or scaling your business or things that are really important for your business growth are hurting because you're stuck in dealing with bookkeeping or administration or the little minutia things that you don't have to be doing. That's when you want to consider hiring right now, in today's day and age, there's so many different options to delegate things that you can definitely afford one of them, [00:15:00] right?

Many of my clients don't necessarily start with a full-time employee or even part-time employee. They start with contractors, with freelancers who have. Flexible arrangements. Maybe at first it's the project base only then maybe you hire somebody to work with you on as needed basis until your business is ready financially and growth wise for you to hire full-time employees.

What you don't want is get to the point where your business growth is actually stalled because you are the bottleneck. You are trying to do it all. I was talking lately to one of my strategic partners, a tax professional in CPE, who is. Telling me that they have a client who actually has a relatively large business and multiple six figures, and they're still doing their bookkeeping alone, trying to save a [00:16:00] few bucks without realizing how much time it takes them and how.

They could have put the time into growing their business and looking for new clients and new deals, especially that this is what they want. So when you are starting to hold your business back, because you're spending time on something that. Takes you longer. And for example, in terms of bookkeeping and finances, you might actually be putting your business at risk if you don't really know exactly how to do it well,

you might be thinking you're saving money, but you're actually costing yourself money because there's always something like opportunity costs you need to consider. So you need to consider why am I not getting, how much money am I not making when I'm trying to do task that I should? Delegate to a professional trying to save a few bucks.

Not to mention the risk I'm potentially creating when it comes to finances [00:17:00] and government matters.

And then the last fear I wanted to talk about was, but I don't know how to manage people. I'm not a people manager or leader. And of course you don't if you've never done it before. And of course you might not have that identity of a people leader just yet, leading and managing people is a skillset, and delegation is one of the skills in that step.

I never knew how to lead people until I became a supervisor. And then thanks to the coaching and mentoring that I received over my career and the trainings I took, I became a great leader. Not because I was born with the skillset, but because it put time and effort to learn. To learn it from others, to learn it from trainings, to always get better.

And what I find in my clients, when they come to me with that thought, they [00:18:00] quickly realize as we are growing and mastering their people leadership skills and that they actually love it. They see how much their business benefits from having team members and how much they love having a team that they.

End up loving being a CEO.

So now let's talk about how to delegate. Number one, you want to play to people's strength. So again, if you are spending time trying to pull your hair out, figuring out your bookkeeping, hire a professional, or if you are spending a lot of time. On administration that's not really bringing value to your business growth, but needs to be done higher.

Va, those are professionals who love what they're doing or really efficient and effective at it, and do a better job than [00:19:00] you.

Even as a corporate leader, whenever I had team members that I wanted to grow and I wanted to prepare for their next step, I was always looking at tasks that I could delegate, that they would really enjoy that, that they would play to the strength because there were so much more likely to do well and to enjoy them and then grow within that.

Okay. Principle number two is training will be required only because you're hiring a professional, or even if it's a, especially if it's a junior member, but even a professional, there will be things you will need to train them on. So don't be surprised that. You might need to spend some time with them. In the beginning, like very often that's Tom's business owners from hiring because they think oh, I'll have to spend some time and what's the point?

Or they're expecting the [00:20:00] professional that they hire delegate to just to know everything. Yeah, the bookkeeper will know bookkeeping, but they do not know your business. They do not know your clients. They do not know your processes. They will have to learn that, and you need to allocate time and patience to teach them that.

Now, if you, let's say, decided to hire a junior person to help you with maybe your service delivery. Maybe you're a therapist and you're hiring younger therapists to mentor them, but also to help you, let's say, take on your clients because your schedule doesn't allow you anymore. Then of course you'll need to.

Train them a little bit and mentor them, just like probably you are trained in the beginning. So think about that, not only as the, necessity that you have to do, but an investment of your time and effort into having an amazing employee down the line who will [00:21:00] help you not only take tasks of your plate, but actually grow your business.

The third principle that we talked a little bit before is trust, but check. So only because you're delegating the task doesn't mean you're completely forgetting about it, never looking at it, and it just magically happens. No. As you grow a business, you're growing a team, and the team means there is collaboration, communication between team members, so everybody's on the same page.

So you as the business owner and CEO, you still know what's going on. It just means. When you're delegating a task, you are not the one doing the task. So there will be still touch points and meetings that you will need to have with your team members to see how things are going. Are we getting the results that we wanna get?

And if not, to have an opportunity to talk through any challenges and help your team members with anything that they might need help [00:22:00] with. Which then leads to principle number four is. Praise your team members, collaborators often on anything that you can praise them on and coach as required, right?

There will be always opportunities to get better. You are not perfect. You don't do everything in your business perfectly, right? There's things that don't work the first time or little mistakes that you do that you need to correct. It will be the same with other people. We're all human, and as humans by definitions will not be perfect.

Now, of course, if you hire great people and you train them properly and you explain properly. They won't make big mistakes, bad things will happen. So be ready to coach your partners as required and praise them as often as you can to build that culture of support and just [00:23:00] positive environment.

The fifth principle is, as much as possible allow for. Your team members own creativity to shine. Give them room for making certain decisions alone and allow them to sometimes be wrong and make mistakes. Now you can grow. Their capacity of making their own decisions and being more in control of how they do things as your relationship progresses, right?

So in the beginning when you don't know them fully yet, you don't fully trust them yet. You might need to be more in control of how they. Things and check on them more often, but as your relationship grows, their skillset improves and you'll also trust them better because you've seen their work. You see how reliable they are, where you're just building a regular relationship.

Then you [00:24:00] can. Expand and give them more agency, more freedom in certain aspects of their role. Right? Building a relationship with another human doesn't happen overnight. We don't just get to trust strangers after five minutes of a conversation normally, right?

It takes time. So it's the same with anybody you start collaborating with or you hire as your employee.

Now, what are the benefits of delegating? There are a lot, but let me just mention a few of them. First of all, you free your time out of the task that as a CEO, maybe you shouldn't be focusing on anymore, and you free that time, energy, and. Attention to focus on things that move your business forward faster that only you can do.

You usually also reduce your stress level because when we're [00:25:00] trying to do it all and we're the roadblock for the business to grow, we know that and that stresses us out. Another benefit is you actually get to build a business the way you want and live the life the way you want it.

Just before recording this podcast episode, I was actually looking at a reel that one of my clients created on Instagram, and she was sharing how at. On a day of a big projects that they had, she was able to go with her baby and her. Toddler daughter to the library while her team was actually at the installation on the client side, making a client happy, and she was reminiscing of how she didn't think it was ever possible, and yet within the four years she built that [00:26:00] business while working the way she wants and spending the time she wanted with her family and growing her family.

Of course you would never be able to do that if she didn't delegate and learn how to be a people leader. Another benefit that I discovered and my clients discovered down the line, it is very fulfilling to see your own team members grow and. Be fulfilled by what they do and just seeing the team work together better.

It's really a special privilege that we have as people leaders. Now, if you feel that you can't do it alone and you need some help and you want some help to developing those leadership skillset, I can help. All you need to do is go to my website https://stairwaytoleadership.com, book a [00:27:00] consultation, and let's talk about how I can help you grow your business by growing your team.

Have a great week.