My article for Catalyst on The Five Components of Effective Delegation is now up at their site. Here’s the start:

WITH SO MANY THINGS ON OUR TO-DO LISTS AND SO MANY NEW THINGS COMING AT US EVERY DAY, HOW DO WE STAY ABOVE WATER AS LEADERS?

One common answer is delegation. That’s good advice, but it’s often incomplete. The problem is that we often aren’t taught how to delegate effectively. As a result, when we finally overcome the mistake of not delegating at all, we easily end up making the other mistake of delegating in the wrong way. Unfortunately, this mistake can be even worse! Bad delegation results in frustration, confusion, and discouragement for the people we delegate to.

So how do we delegate in a way that works? That is, what does real delegation actually look like, and how do we do it?

Read the whole thing.

This is a really good article over at 99U on overcoming the biggest obstacle to delegation. I love out how it starts out by nailing the exact difficulty that I find with delegation:

You’ve tried every productivity hack in the book and have reached your max capacity in terms of output. You know that you need outside help to bring the work to the next level… but you hesitate. On the one hand, the idea of not having to do everything yourself really appeals to you. On the other, you wonder if you can handle the management responsibilities on top of your already heavy workload.

Your concerns are valid. In order for people to help you, they need to know what you need and to receive feedback and direction along the way. Your workflow that was uniquely yours will now have to account for another person. With the right systems and communication, this process can run relatively smoothly. But without them, the people who were supposed to help can end up creating more work.

She then gives five very helpful strategies. It’s worth the read.

Being a self-starter is one of the most important ingredients for effectiveness. If you can’t motivate yourself and get yourself going, it’s hard to do anything.

Ironically, however, once you get going, being a self-starter also creates your biggest problem. Your own talent of being a self-starter can work against you. The reason is that self-starters are very good at doing everything themselves — that’s one reason they can get things going so well. But, in order to scale, you need to move beyond doing everything yourself to working through others. The (very good) characteristics of being a self-starter interfere with that and thus interfere with the ability to scale.

Scott Belsky says this well in his excellent book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality:

Self-starters are often successful doing everything themselves. However, when forced to grow beyond a one-person show, many creative people struggle to make the leap from a solo success to a successful collaboration.

There is a way around this. The key is to develop the capacity and habit to delegate more and turn the work over to the team. This is very hard to do, and actually takes practice, but can be done. And the first step is in recognizing that there is a difference between doing and leading. It’s possible to do both; but we need to be aware of the differences and make the intentional shift from one to the other, lest your focus on doing undo your ability to lead.

This is a guest post by Loren Pinilis, who blogs on time management from a biblical perspective at Life of a Steward. 

In Exodus 18, Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, offers sound advice that all leaders should take to heart.

From morning to evening, Moses would judge the disputes of the people. And from morning to evening, they would stand around waiting to have their cases heard. Jethro counseled Moses: “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you.”

Moses was essentially micro-managing things by allowing all decisions to be funneled through him.

Note that Moses had good intentions. He wanted the people to know and understand the law, and he took his influence and responsibility over the nation seriously. He judged each case personally because each case mattered to him and to God.

It’s the same for leaders today, particularly in ministry roles. We have a reverence for even the smallest areas under our influence, and we have a healthy respect for our duties as leaders.

But there are very serious consequences when we let our concept of a sacred duty turn into micro-management.

Jethro could see that this pattern of behavior would cause utter exhaustion for Moses, and that’s what most people focus on when they mention this passage. But Jethro also realized that Moses’s leadership style would have a negative effect on the people. The court would get backlogged, the nation would be frustrated, and eventually many would abandon the idea of receiving justice.

When a leader insists on making or approving every decision, an organizational bottleneck is created. The limiting factor for that organization’s effectiveness becomes the time and attention of the leader.

An interesting thing then often happens. The leaders recognize that they can only do so much. But rather than delegate some of their decision making (often out of a well-intentioned respect for their responsibility), they engineer the system to accommodate for their limited time.

Teams prepare proposals and reports to pre-digest the information for those who have the ability to pull the trigger. It seems sensible: you’re minimizing the time the leaders spend on approving decisions and therefore maximizing what your organization can do.

But this is designing the entire organizational structure around the limitations of the leader. It’s the exact opposite of how leadership should work.

Imagine how many hours the team spends preparing reports to save the leader a few minutes. Imagine what else could have been done with that time and energy. This is the price of micro-management.

Jethro’s advice wasn’t to streamline the court. It wasn’t to appoint people who would summarize the information for Moses so he could render quick verdicts.

Instead, Jethro’s wise counsel was to delegate: to train up leaders who could take a portion of Moses’s authority and participate with him in caring for the nation. Moses could lead instead of holding everyone back.

He could handle his workload. The people wouldn’t be frustrated. Leaders would be trained for greater things. And Justice would be administered.

Acts 6 shows us the legitimacy of delegation, even in the context of the church. Pastors can’t do everything, for example, and it is right to have a team of people that you delegate areas of responsibility to.

But Acts 6 also teaches us that mere delegation is not enough. You have to delegate to competent people that are actually capable of doing good. Note, for example, how the apostles were not careless in who they delegated the food distribution to. They delegated it to capable men, individuals of “good repute and full of the Holy Spirit.”

Now, listen. It’s easy to go wrong here and think that good character is enough. It’s not. The people you delegate to must have character and competence. To delegate to someone who has two hour devotions every day (which is not even, by itself, a mark of true Christian character) but doesn’t know how to serve well (or have the willingness to learn) is not right. It is, in fact, irresponsible.

I would in fact argue that true Christian character actually manifests itself in the desire and quest to become competent. Not everyone is a star right out of the gate, and we need to give people opportunities to learn and grow. But if someone has demonstrated incompetence over a sustained period of time along with the lack of desire, or inability, to learn how to carry out their function well (to those working under them just as much as those who work above them), continuing to delegate to them is irresponsible. It is not the model of Acts 6.

As Christians who care about loving and serving others, we care about truly helping people, and not merely making noble attempts. That means that it’s not enough to delegate to “someone.” We must delegate to able, competent, faithful individuals.