It’s no secret that effective delegation is critical if you’re looking to grow your agency. You can’t grow if the work is tied to your own capacity, so you must know what to delegate and how to delegate effectively. How to effectively delegate is a massive topic in its own right, and something we focus on extensively in the Agency to Exit program. For now, I will focus on the “what” to delegate.

If you don’t know what to delegate, you’ll never progress. If you delegate the wrong things you’ll move backward, but if you deliberately identify and delegate the correct things, you’ll be able to grow from strength to strength.

The fastest and most effective way of identifying what to delegate is something I call ‘task scoring’ which consists of three simple steps:

Step 1: Write out a list of every task you perform. Create categories to make it easier and take the time to identify each task and sub-tasks. You can do this from memory, but I recommend time logging or task tracking for a few weeks.

Step 2: Score each task from 1 to 5 against the criteria, “how critical is this to the business?”

Step 3: Score each task from 1 to 5 against the criteria, “how critical is it that I perform this task?”

Every task you perform will now have two scores next to it showing how important it is to the business and how important it is that you perform the task. From here you can follow the logic:

  • If it’s important to the business and important that it’s you – you keep doing it.
  • If it’s important to the business but NOT important that it’s you – you delegate it.
  • If it’s NOT important to the business, it shouldn’t be you – you abdicate it.

The difference between delegating and abdicating is whether you retain or hand over responsibility. When you delegate, you remain responsible for the outcome but not the delivery. When you abdicate, you walk away, making someone else responsible.

Once you’ve completed this task-scoring exercise you’ll be amazed at how few things you should be doing, and how many you can delegate. Keen to hear your feedback on this exercise.