Deciding: In this phase, you assign tasks to other people. Whether they are full- or part-time employees, or freelancers, or contractors, they are really only task rabbits. They try to do the one task you gave them and then come back to you to ask questions, get your approval, have you solve problems, and help them come up with ideas. If there is any unexpected anomaly to the task at hand, the person comes back to you for your decision. When they finish a task, they either sit idle or ask you, “What should I do now?”
Most entrepreneurs confuse Deciding with Delegating. If you assign a task to someone else but need to answer questions to get the task done, you are not Delegating—you are Deciding. Business owners who have two or three employees can get stuck spending most of their time in this phase. Your employees do the work, but because you make every decision for them, you’re never able to grow beyond two or three employees. Work becomes a constant and distracting stream of questions from employees. It eventually gets so bad that you throw your hands up in frustration and make the decision to “go back to how it was before” and do all the work yourself. You get rid of your help, go solo for a while (because it is easier to just do work than to decide for everyone else), only to soon enough get overwhelmed with the work and then hire again, and return to getting frustrated with the Deciding phase. You flip-flop back and forth for the life of the business between doing the work and deciding for the few employees, over and over again.
Delegating: In this phase, you’re able to assign the task to an employee as well as empower them to make decisions about executing that task. The person is fully accountable for the completion of the task. They are on their own. As you spend more of your time in the Delegating phase, you will start to feel some relief from your workload, but only if you delegate in the right way. Initially, you must reward your employees’ ownership of a task—not the outcome—because the goal is to shift the responsibility for decision making from you to them. If they are punished for wrong decisions, you will only be training them to come back to you for decisions. You, too, have made wrong decisions in the past; that’s how you grew. They will make wrong decisions, and that is how they will grow. The Delegating phase can be extremely difficult for entrepreneurs, because we can do everything perfectly (in our mind) and get frustrated when they don’t. You must get past this perfection mind-set if you ever want your business to successfully run itself.
Designing: This is when you work on the ever-evolving vision for your company and the flow of the business to support that vision. The business runs the day-to-day on its own. Shoot, you could even take a four-week vacation without the business missing a beat. (Put a pin in that.) When you are in this mode, you will not only be free from the daily grind, but you will also experience the most joy in your work. Your job is elevated to managing the business by numbers and fixing the flow of business when things aren’t the way they are supposed to be. This is when you are no longer needed to do the work; you are now overseeing the work (to the degree you want to) and doing only the work you want to. This is the good life, my brothers and sisters.
DOING IS GETTING YOU NOWHERE
I can read your mind. I know, it’s a little creepy. But you are my kindred spirit BFF, and I am sure I know what you’re thinking right now: “I can’t stop doing the work. I’m the only person who really knows how to do the X, Y, and Z around here. My staff is great and all, but they can only do their stuff. When it comes to the stuff I do, no one else can even come close. I am that committed. I am that good. I am the only one who will ever be able to do what I do. And when the sheeyat hits the fan, it’s all me, baby. All me!”
Am I close? I think I am. It’s not hard to read your mind, because I suspect you and I are not that different. It took me years to stop believing my own hype, and, truthfully, I still struggle with the urge to “just do everything myself.” In my more than twenty years as an entrepreneur, “doing everything” was something I expected of myself. I was a “serious” entrepreneur. I did “whatever it took” to grow my business. And because I succeeded, I attributed much of that success to my “tireless” work ethic. Even when I had a staff of nearly thirty employees, I still burned the midnight oil, doing much of the work and overseeing the rest of it because “no one can ever do the stuff only I can do.” I just wished that my employees would “step up” and “act like an owner.” But they didn’t. They just bothered me with an endless stream of questions. Notice all of the quotation marks in this paragraph? That’s because most of my perceptions were, like I said, hype—total BS.
Again, as a business leader, your time is best spent Designing the work, not Doing the work. What do I mean by “Designing the work”? Let’s use a football analogy. (Go Hokies!) It’s the story of the team owner, the coach, and the players. The players are empowered to make split-second decisions in the field of play, the coach creates the game plan and calls the plays, and the team owner designs the team. The owner lays out the vision for the franchise, picks the coach(es) to manage the team, and then watches from afar as the team puts the game plan into action. For the outsider, it may be a bit confusing. It just looks like a rich old guy eating mini-wieners in the glassed-in suite. But there is much more going on than you can see. The owner is always optimizing every element of the franchise: the team, the sponsor deals, the seat sales and the up-sells, the marketing, the budget, etc.
As a designer, you think several steps ahead. You are strategic. You measure opportunities and risk. Is every move you make the right one? Of course not. But you measure the outcomes of your moves and make adjustments accordingly on your subsequent moves. And to be your company’s designer you must get off the field and up in the suite. Just avoid those mini-wieners. Nothing good ever comes from those things.
Every entrepreneur starts out as a doer, because doing things is what we’re good at. The problem arises when you get stuck in that phase, and all the Doing keeps you from your bigger vision of building a business. You’re already familiar with Design work. It’s what you loved when you first started—creating a vision for your company and considering the big, bold strategic moves you could make. So this is also the work that you have the firsthand knowledge to do effectively—direct the flow of the business. When you are spending most of your work time in Design mode, your company achieves absolute efficiency and scalability potential. As designer, you are giving your company your best—your genius, the genius that started it all. You are also removed from the day-to-day operations so that your business can run without you, which means it can also grow without you. Your purpose is to design the flow of your business, point it in the direction of growth, and then make strategic decisions to fix, change, and/or improve things when the flow is not right.
Even when we appreciate the value of Design work, most of us still devote too many hours to Doing. This doesn’t just apply to the solopreneur who hasn’t delegated anything yet, but also for leaders of teams of five, or fifty, or five hundred. Owners, managers, and C-suite teams can get trapped in the Doing just as much as any solopreneur.
A 2009 study by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, confirmed that people trying to find their way through a forest or a desert devoid of landmarks (and without the sun as a beacon) tend to walk in circles. People walked in circles as tight as sixty-six feet while thinking they were walking perfectly straight. That is like putting a blindfold on and trying to walk across a football field, the short way, one sideline to the other, and never making it across.
Researchers concluded that in the absence of clear markers of distance and direction, we make a continuous stream of micro adjustments to what we think is straight, but those adjustments are biased to one side more than the other. Our constantly changing sense of what is straight keeps us walking in a loop. We circle and circle, ultimately perishing, when we could have easily gotten out of the weeds by just walking straight.
You can overcome this tende
ncy if you have a distinct landmark to move toward, and if you are lucky enough to be equipped with a compass or GPS. The distinct and distant landmark allows us to constantly recalibrate our direction and stay straight. Even when an obstacle presents itself, we can avoid it, move around it, or run from it, and then again spot our landmark and use it to correct our course.
Why am I telling you this? Because a business that doesn’t devote time to determine where it wants to go, seek ways to get there, and identify the landmarks that will offer the most direct route is destined to spin in circles for eternity. The struggle to escape the Survival Trap is constant. The business owner and team toil away, month after month, year after year, hoping to move forward, but in the absence of a clear sense of direction, they are surprised and frustrated when they keep circling back to the same spot.
By becoming a designer of your business, your role is to define what your company is marching toward, identify the landmarks that signify progress, equip yourself and your team with the tools (for example, a dashboard that acts likes a business’s GPS), and establish strategies to make the path safer, easier, faster, and more efficient (like building a bridge across a river).
A business can only experience extraordinary progress with extraordinary design. And you can only do that if you devote time to this most important endeavor. Time to establish what your company’s Big Beautiful Audacious Noble Goal is. Time to think about the impact you are intending to have on your clients. Time to figure out the right strategy to achieve that impact. And time to determine what metrics you will use to measure the progress of your company and your team. This is your company’s destination and your vision for it.
The worst part about walking in circles? We don’t believe we are doing it even when we see proof. In the study by the German research group, participants were dropped in the middle of a German forest and another group in the Sahara Desert. With GPS tracking devices attached to them, they were given simple instructions: walk straight for a few hours. When the sun or moon was visible, people stayed on a somewhat direct course. But on a cloudy day or a night with no moonlight, people reverted to their looping pattern immediately. Worse yet, the terrain caused even more complications with direction, creating a channeling effect. People can’t walk straight without a landmark, and when complications present themselves, they often put people in a whole new direction yet again.
Trying to build a business by just Doing and without Designing is like walking through a dense forest while blindfolded. It is inevitable you will walk in circles and be thrown into another course if you come across a substantial obstacle. Navigating the terrain of growing an organization needs a designer who looks beyond the constant stream of challenges and opportunities immediately in front of them and instead charts a path to success. And that designer is you. Yes, even if you’ve lost touch with the vision you once had, even if you feel you haven’t seen your creativity in the last decade, and even if you wonder if you truly have what it takes to navigate your ship to new, prosperous shores—you are the best person for the “design” job. You can do it.
THE DELEGATION COMPLICATION
When you first want to scale your business, the Deciding phase comes quickly. The process is easy—hire people and tell them what to do. Getting them to do the work without your input? Not so easy. And we bring this problem on ourselves. Every time my staff had a question and came back to me for a decision, it made sense. They were new employees and they needed to learn the right way to do things—my way. So I gave them the answers they needed and sent them on their way to do the work. Plus, every time they had a question that only I could answer, it pumped my ego and fulfilled my need to feel important. I’m just being real with you here. And you need to be real with yourself, too: knowing what others don’t is an ego boost.
I thought the need to answer everyone’s questions would be short lived. They were learning the tools of the trade, and I expected the questions to slow down. But, oddly enough, they increased. The problem that I didn’t realize, until it was too late, was that I was teaching them to always get the answers from me. All they ever mastered was the BuTSOOM system that I taught them. You know, the Bug the Shit Out of Me system.
I bet you have taught your team the BuTSOOM system, too. And I will bet you are all too familiar with how it goes down. It starts with the “better than sliced bread” moment. You bring on virtual help, or a part- or full-timer. On the first day, the only person more excited and anxious than that employee is you. Within days you’re thinking, “This new hire, she is taking so much work off my hands. Why didn’t I do this sooner? She is ‘better than sliced bread.’”
The newbie has tons of questions, but that is to be expected. In fact, that is what you want: a learner. But a few weeks later, this person still has tons of questions. She’s asking questions she should know the answer to by now. What is going on? Then, in a few more weeks or months, that new “bread” is now a total distraction. The questions never stop. You are pulled from your own work constantly to serve her. That is when you realize this bread is that lamely made, gluten-free kind. You know, it is about as flexible as concrete and has the rich flavor of cardboard. That is when you start to think, “It’s just easier to do all the work myself.”
When you give your employees all the answers, you block their learning. I suspect that when you first learned to drive a car, you only figured it out, for real, by driving the car. Yeah, you went through that six-hour, in-classroom driver’s-ed course where you were told the gas pedal is on the right and the brake is on the left. But even with those instructions, when it actually came to driving the car, chances are you overaccelerated or hit the brake too hard. I bet that as you learned to steer a car, you went a little too tight and crushed a cone or two.
The learning—the true learning—is in the doing. You must experience it for it to become ingrained in you. Our employees must experience the decision making for it to become ingrained in them. The irony, of course, is when you hire someone to do the work, you specifically are doing it so you can reduce your work. But if you allow yourself to make all the decisions for them, your work increases, and their growth stops in its tracks.
Having to oversee my staff didn’t reduce my hours. I actually worked more, because I was constantly pulled away from the work I should have been doing to make a decision for someone else. Then, when I got back to my work, I would have to sync up again, which as you know all too well, takes time. The distraction of being the decider made me super inefficient. Employees would put their work on hold as they waited their turn to ask me a question. They literally stopped taking action until I gave them direction. My work stopped and so did theirs! Trying to do my job and supervise my staff was like trying to type a letter and handwrite instructions at the same time. Try it. You can’t do it.*
This experience led me to believe I had to get more work off my plate, so I would hire another person. And another. And another. Until I was making decisions for an entire team and trying to do my work at night, on weekends, at the crack o’ dawn. As a result, the company became more inefficient, because all of those people were waiting for me to make decisions. Instead of capturing and utilizing the most powerful resource I had—their brains—we were all dependent on mine. As an added bonus, all those salaries drained my bank accounts.
I decided to get back to what worked—me and me alone. I fired everyone to get back to getting my stuff done. I thought that would be easier. I had romanticized notions of being the lone wolf entrepreneur who “Gets Shit Done.” I was delusional; it was as if I forgot what it was like to do every job. The cycle started all over again. Flipping between Doing and Deciding is more common than you think. That’s why most businesses don’t ever get past one or two employees.
Answering their questions made my work wait, and doing my work made my employees wait for my answers. According to Daniel S. Vacanti, author of Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduc
tion, more than 85 percent of a project’s life span is spent in queue, waiting for something or someone. While waiting time is inefficient, it’s also exhausting. If we can reduce waiting time, we can improve growth—and gain sanity.
Many businesses with fewer than three employees get stuck playing the waiting game, and in the back-and-forth between the doing and deciding phases. Business owners start with “I need to do it all” and move to “I need to hire people to do it.” Then, when they discover their workload hasn’t lightened up, and they are more stressed and strapped for cash than ever, they end up thinking, “Everyone is a moron, and I will fire them all and just do it myself,” which eventually leads them back to “Oh, God, I can’t keep doing this, I need to hire people desperately,” and back around to “Is everyone on this planet an idiot?”
No, your people are not idiots. Far from it. They just need you to stop Doing and Deciding and start Delegating not just the deeds, but the decisions. For real.
I was chatting with Scott Oldford, founder of INFINITUS Marketing & Technology, when he said, “The biggest problem is that no one has taught entrepreneurs the mind-set of delegating. It’s not that they don’t know they need to delegate. They just need to get into the mind-set of letting go. Then, when they are committed to it, they need to do it the right way.”
Scott explained that the delegating is a process. “First, you assign a task. Then you assign the responsibility. Then you ask them to own the results. Finally, you ask them to own the outcome, which is repeated results over time.”
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 4