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Delegation for founders: how to pick tasks and brief them

Delegation for founders starts with one idea: you cannot do every job, and the work you keep should be the work only you can do. Most founders know this. Few have a simple way to decide what to hand off and how to explain it. This guide gives you both.

Why founders hold on too long

In a young company you did everything. You wrote the offer, sent the invoices and fixed the website. Letting go feels risky because the work reflects on you. It also feels slower. Explaining a task can take longer than doing it once.

That is true for one task. It is not true for a task you repeat every week. If a job comes back again and again, ten minutes spent teaching it now saves hours later. Your time is the one thing the business cannot buy more of.

There is a cost to holding on, too. When every decision waits for you, the team waits. Good people lose heart when they cannot finish anything alone.

Step 1: Sort your tasks into four piles

Write down everything you did last week. Then sort each item by two questions. Is it important? Is it urgent? Important means it moves the business toward its goals. Urgent means it wants an answer now.

US President Dwight Eisenhower repeated a remark from a former college president in a 1954 speech. The man said his problems came in two kinds: urgent ones and important ones. He added that urgent things are not important, and important things are never urgent. The line is the root of what many managers now call the Eisenhower matrix. It is a handy way to see where your hours go.

  • Important and urgent: do these yourself now, or hand them off with close support.
  • Important, not urgent: plan time for these. Strategy, key hires and big partners usually live here.
  • Urgent, not important: hand these off first. Many emails, bookings and small requests sit here.
  • Neither: stop doing them.

Most founders find the third pile is the biggest. That pile is where delegation pays off fastest.

Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois, August 19, 1954 (The American Presidency Project, presidency.ucsb.edu).

Step 2: Match the task to the person

Not everyone needs the same amount of direction. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard described this in their book Management of Organizational Behavior, which they call Situational Leadership. The idea is simple. Match your style to how ready the person is for that task.

  • Telling: the person is new to the task. Give clear steps and check often.
  • Selling: the person is willing but still learning. Explain why, and answer questions.
  • Participating: the person can do the work but doubts themselves. Ask for their ideas and back their choices.
  • Delegating: the person is able and willing. Hand over the goal and the job.

Readiness belongs to a task, not a person. A strong designer may be new to budgeting. Judge each task on its own. If you hand a new task to someone at the delegating level before they are ready, it will fail, and you will decide delegation does not work. It does. The match was wrong.

Source: Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources (Prentice-Hall).

Step 3: Brief the task in five lines

A poor brief is the most common reason delegation fails. Before you hand off a task, write five short lines.

  1. The result. What does done look like? Be exact. "A one page price list in PDF" beats "sort out pricing".
  2. The reason. Why does it matter? People make better choices when they know the goal.
  3. The limits. Give the budget, the tools and any rule that cannot bend.
  4. The deadline. Give a date and a time, not "soon".
  5. The check-in. Say when you will look at progress, and what you will look at.

Then ask the person to say the task back to you in their own words. This takes one minute. It catches most mistakes before they cost a day.

Step 4: Check in without taking the job back

Set one early check, about a quarter of the way through. Look at a rough draft, not a finished piece. It is much easier to change direction early.

When you see a problem, ask a question before you give an answer. "What are you planning next?" works better than "do it this way". If you fix the work yourself, the person learns that you will always rescue them. Take the task back only when the risk is high and time is short, and say so plainly.

Thank people for good work, and be specific. "The price list was clear and the layout was easy to read" tells them what to repeat.

Start small this week

Do not try to hand off your whole job on Monday. Pick two tasks from the urgent, not important pile. Choose people who are ready for them. Write the five line brief for each. Review the results in a week and note what went well and what you left out of the brief.

Each handoff makes the next one easier. Over a few months your own calendar opens up for the work only you can do, and your team gains skills the business needs as it grows.

Sources

  • The American Presidency Project: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Address at the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, Evanston, Illinois, August 19, 1954 (presidency.ucsb.edu)
  • Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard: Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources (Prentice-Hall)