Delegate your job

If you want to grow your business, it can’t be dependent on you.

If you have to approve everything, look at all the sales, or all the mail, or all the bills, or all the paychecks, and be involved in everything.

You are just going to drive yourself nuts and be the bottleneck, which is, after all, at the top of the bottle.

You don’t scale.  You can only have 24 hours in a day.  

While you do not scale, you can leverage yourself through other people.

Cut off chunks of what you do each day and empower others to take that job.  Try to make yourself obsolete.

Don’t worry, it will never happen (unless you really want it to), but try.

One day recently I had “nothing to do” on my calendar – or at least “not much to do”.  Well,  I worked diligently as always, and I did not get it all done!

Here’s the key.  A leader should not have a job to do in operations, sales, etc.  Okay, when you are starting out and very small, the job of “visionary” is not a position; it’s something you do while you are doing a job in your four-person organization.  The leader’s activities change as the company grows. And you can say that the company grows BECAUSE the leadership job changes.

But a leader cannot be fully scheduled all the time with meetings, duties, and to-dos.  You need whitespace to be most effective.

If you are always putting important projects and thinking off because you “don’t have time today”, or this week, then you can’t take the time to understand, discern, and solve key issues in your business that will move it forward.  You are in the fishbowl, and you can’t see it correctly.

Make whitespace – so you can fill it with projects that matter even more.