DELEGATION system FOR ENTREPRENEURS TO CONSIDER WHILE SCALING

There are a lot of resources out there about "Why" or "What" to delegate, but not too many on "How" (at least none that were granular enough for me), so I wrote this up in the hopes that it maybe adds some speed to your execution. 

In order for delegation to work properly, you need 3 ingredients:

1.  Clear roles and lines of responsibility at the "owner" level;

2.  A task management system;

3.  The right person to execute (or delegate downwards) the tasks.

First, you need clear lines and roles at the "owner" level.  For example, at the firm I have two seats (my maximum!): Managing Partner (50%) and Business Development (50%).  I've further broken these roles down to a handful of tasks that are routinely on my plate and worth my time.  And by "worth my time" I mean that if I had to hire someone else to perform either of these roles, would I want to pay them a salary equal to mine to do these tasks.  So, for example, "Managing Partner" time is mostly spent recruiting A+ talent, brainstorming, working on strategy stuff, and mentoring/coaching my direct reports.  My "Business Development" activities are mostly spent connecting with current clients, brainstorming ways to create value for prospective and current clients, and working with our marketing & BD staff.  I try to keep it simple, scheduling time for these activities on my calendar so that the most important tasks for my role are getting done.

Second, the task management system is crucial.  There are various ways of doing this.  I use Getting Things Done, which is a productivity system that I've been using for about 5 years.  There is a lot to unpack with it, but basically, whenever something comes up in the day-to-day that doesn't fit within one of the buckets above, I just add it to a list.  That list gets sent to our Firm Administrator on Monday's (more on this in a second).  She then delegates it to the appropriate person.  If you're interested in a good resource that is scalable throughout an organization, I recommend GTD.  I finally decided to have all 30 of our team get trained on it -  I was tired of not having everyone speak my language - here's the class we're using: Crucial Learning: Getting Things Done.  I also have a friend who uses Pipedrive to track tasks throughout his organization of 80+ people; I don't think GTD is the required task management system, but I do think that a fast growing company can execute faster and with less stress (and less mistakes) with a company-wide task management system.

Third, you need the right person doing the right things.  I've spent quite a bit of time lecturing on the dangers of under-delegation within our firm, but have had little success in fixing this problem until now.  I'm equal parts embarrassed and astounded at how I fixed this problem.  I was at the gym a few months ago and my trainer was telling me about push vs. pull workouts.  And I thought, "Well, shoot...".  Then I went to the office and wrote up a scorecard (more on scorecards in a later post, but we use a modified version of TopGrading) for a Firm Administrator whose job it is to pull administrative tasks from my partners, attorneys and senior staff.  Her quarterly performance is evaluated based on how well she pulls administrative tasks from others.  This has taken the form of a weekly one-on-one with her and all senior staff, taking everything off of their plate not related to one of their two roles.  And while she's pulling these tasks, I'm having her code them as "Marketing" or "HR" or "Recruiting" or "Payroll/Benefits", etc., so that when we build up a regular pipeline of tasks in the HR arena, that will be our trigger to hire an HR coordinator, for example.  We've already created 2 additional admin positions (we went from being really bad at delegating to amazing at it pretty quickly), freeing up folks for higher-value tasks.