From the Founder's Desk: A Thought Experiment on Delegation
When I became a people manager for the first time in a large MNC, we had a lot of specific training to go through. - in those sessions, there was quite a bit of emphasis on delegation. In fact most of our younger trainers (who had been managers themselves only a short while) said that this was one of their biggest challenges when they became managers, and one that they were still in the process of overcoming. Little did I know then, that this very key managerial skill will become extremely relevant as I make my way through my startup journey.
This blog is not about why it's difficult to delegate, and how to overcome it. - There are many blogs on this, with good research and reasoning behind it. Instead, I want to delve a bit on what I think the essence of delegation is. To me, to delegate is to grow. Not just personal growth, hard, real, revenue-and-profits kind of growth.
It took me becoming a founder to get this perspective, but nowhere is it clearer than in a startup - that when you delegate, you grow. When you hire people, you grow. When you create processes and create team structures to enable those processes in a consistent manner, you grow. So, in essence, to delegate is to grow.
I also believe that in a startup, the corollary - that if you don't delegate, you don't grow, is also true.
When you are smaller it's easier to see this - and all founders go through the phase where they have hired the first few people to do things that the founders were doing themselves, so that the business can grow. Some founders may choose not to hire and delegate, due to various reasons - could be financial pressure, could be that they want to establish PMF (Product Market Fit) before they do so, but this choice would have come with a period of less or no growth (which they might be okay with as the focus could be on more critical things like PMF).
If you are largely in agreement so far, then let's push this thinking a bit more. Humour me as I guide us into a thought experiment (It's likely most relevant for founders but others may benefit too). What if, instead of delegating when the need arises and when we are comfortable doing so (process standardisation, scaling, growth), we proactively ask ourselves, say right now - ‘What among the things that I am doing, can I delegate?’ If you find a few aspects of work that you are doing that you can delegate but haven't yet, then I think you should explore options to do so. In the process, you may sometimes find valid reasons as to why you can't do it, but there will be some work streams which you absolutely can and can help free up a lot more of your time!
Now, what happens when you delegate some of these work streams?
You likely have standardised some small part of your business model, to the eventual benefit of scaling, or passed on a higher level of ownership and helped upskill one of your employees, or realised some other benefit of delegation. In addition to this, you definitely have carved out valuable time to focus on things that only you, a founder can do - to fund raise, to solve some critical problem, to find new opportunities, to enhance your product etc. If this thought experiment has worked for you, move to the next-level person in your company and do the same. This exercise can possibly lead to higher levels of standardisation, automation (with technology involved, one facet of delegation is also automation) and growth.
So, in a sense I am proposing that rather than grappling with the challenge of delegation, let's use it as a tool to uncover pockets of efficiency and pathways to growth as, to delegate, is to grow.
