QUIT DELEGATING

Buck Up and Quit Delegating
By Donna Fenn | October 27, 2010

Growing up, anytime my brother or I had a task that we were dreading, my Dad would tell us that it was time to “buck up.” About six months ago, I had a “buck-up” moment with my business, ScanDigital, a photo scanning company in El Segundo, CA. But instead of bucking up, I delegated that task (the full story is below). As it turns out I should have handled it myself and since that time, I have done a lot of thinking about delegation.

Take a look at any business book and you’ll find numerous examples of an overly controlling and micro-managing entrepreneurs causing their companies to crash and burn by handling too many things for too long. As a company grows, the need to delegate tasks becomes critical; however, simply delegating is not good enough. Mastering the art of delegation requires business owners to not only share responsibilities with their team, but also to pick the RIGHT tasks to delegate. Often, entrepreneurs are focused on who they’re delegating to and they lose sight of what they’re delegating - a potentially more important part of the equation. As I’ve shared my story with other entrepreneurs, I’ve found that many struggle with delegation. What I’ve learned from my experience and from other successful entrepreneurs is that there are times when you need to “buck up” and handle certain tasks yourself. Here are four examples of tasks you should think twice before you delegate:

* Hiring the right people. Hiring is something that many business owners simply dread. It’s time consuming and you end up interviewing a lot of people who are not right for the job to find one who is. In this job market, employers are inundated with hundreds of resumes for one position, making the task even more burdensome. But this may be a burden worth carrying. Adam Gilbert is the founder of MyBodyTutor.com, a fitness website that provides diet and exercise coaching. When he first started the company, he let one of his tutors higher a few new tutors. “It turned out to be a big waste of time for everyone involved,” he says. “Although they were extremely qualified, they weren’t the right fit, and it wound up costing me a lot more time in the long run.” Now he handles all of the hiring because his tutors are central to creating an amazing experience for their clients. And he understands that skills are often secondary to temperament and how a new employee will fit into the corporate culture.

* Landing your first customers. Many entrepreneurs are inclined to delegate sales efforts too quickly. But during launch of a new website, service or product, it is absolutely critical to be intimately involved with the customer support and feedback from your early users. Levi Matkins, a co-founder of Plundr.com, a shopping-meets-gaming website, narrowly avoided making this mistake. From the moment they launched Plundr.com , the entire team worked to answer customer questions, absorb feedback, address bugs, and find out what features were most important to users. “We had considered focusing on other tasks, but quickly realized that delegating this down would have caused a huge disconnect between the development of Plundr.com and the wants and needs of our users,” says Matkins. Samer Hamadeh, co-founder and former CEO of Vault.com, and entrepreneur-in-residence at Lightspeed Venture Partners, lives by a strict rule: always convert the first customers yourself. “Whether it is the first five, 10, or 20 customers, be involved in those sales from start to finish,” he says. “There will be no better way to hone your product and revenue model. Early on at Vault.com, I was busy raising money, renting space and hiring the team, so I left sales up to someone else. After the dot.com bubble and 9/11, I really dove into sales because we needed to build revenue and I gained a much better understanding of our customers than I ever had before.”

* Your social media presence. Social media is, easy for entrepreneurs to off-load because the tools are free, and the cost of delegation seems minimal. But the true cost is the lost opportunity to build real relationships. David Siteman Garland, founder of The Rise to the Top, a company that helps entrepreneurs build their companies, was recently speaking at an event on social media. During the Q&A session, a young woman mentioned that she was frustrated because she had been “tweeting” for her well-known boss (a speaker) and updating his Facebook profile as if she was him. The problem was that people kept coming up to him and referring to tweets and messages. All he could do was stare blankly because he had no idea what the person was talking about. “This can massively hurt a brand/person/entrepreneur because nobody likes deception,” says Siteman Garland. If someone else is participating on your behalf (which might not be as effective) make sure to disclose this, but better yet stay involved.

* Firing an employee. Back to my story. We had a problem employee who really needed to be fired. I had just left for my first vacation since founding the company three years prior and was looking forward to a week on the beach in Hawaii. But shortly after I landed in Maui, I received a phone call from the office letting me know that the problem employee was back to her usual behavior. We had reached a breaking point and I made the tough decision to let her go, but instead of “bucking up,” I delegated the task. I figured I was out of town and it needed to be dealt with immediately. In hindsight, I should have handled this unpleasant task myself. The employee had serious questions about the exit process and, more importantly, she did not take the news well at all. I realized that if there was a message I was anxious about conveying - whether it be firing someone, going with a different partner, using a different service provider - then those were conversations for me to handle. Time to “buck up.”

Have you ever delegated a task and then wish you had handled it yourself? What’s on your “don’t delegate” list?

MY THOUGHTs

there are some high level tasks that just shouldn't be delegated. people are supposed to do diffrent things at different levels. but this is not the real problem that i've seen. the real problem is that some business owners (and sometimes executives) find it very hard to delegate. it's either they don't know how to. or they don't trust their people enough. or they just super, super scared to let go of control.