Delegate and Elevate

Welcome back to the Business Builder newsletter. We're continuing the EOS series, and in today's issue, I'll share my experience with applying the Delegate and Elevate tool in my business.

Estimated read time: 3 minutes.

Be Your Best: Delegate and Elevate

Whether we're willing to accept it or not, we can't manage every aspect of our business alone.

If we try to manage every aspect of a growing business, eventually it will outgrow our bandwidth.

Creating extensions of yourself is the only way to scale and grow a business. For this reason, delegation is a critical component of any successful company.

Several tasks often can and should be delegated to others. First, stop doing hourly work that can be outsourced at a decent rate. Second, stop doing tasks you do not like and/or are not good at.

You can’t grow your company if you don’t try to make the best use of your time and talents.

How to use the Delegate and Elevate tool: The 4 quadrants

The idea is pretty simple. First, list everything you do over an average week.

Then, take a piece of paper and split it into 4 quadrants:

• “Love/Great” activities you’ve mastered and love doing — they give you energy and a sense of fulfillment.

• “Like/Good” activities you can do with minimal effort that still give enjoyment and satisfaction.

• “Don’t Like/Good” activities that you’re good at — you have learned to do them well through repetition and necessity, but they don’t give you real satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.

• “Don’t Like/Not Good” activities that are most likely outside your area of expertise and leave you feeling inadequate and frustrated.

It should look like this:

Focusing on the bottom half of your chart, identify tasks you can delegate. By assigning these responsibilities to others, you actually elevate the work you do yourself.

Start with the bottom right quadrant—tasks you dislike and are not good at, get rid of these ASAP. You are serving no one by continuing to do these tasks.

The bottom left is what we call “personal hell”, it drains your energy to do things you hate doing even if you are good at them. There’s someone out there who’s great at and would love to take on these tasks.

Over time (this can take several months or years), you should work to remove yourself from items in the bottom quadrants and delegate those out.

This allows you to focus more time on what matters and elevate your work in those areas.

A practical example of using this:

I’ll show you how I applied this tool to a team member of mine, who’s automating processes for the company:

He obviously excels in his main responsibility, which is automation, but he also likes and is skilled in finance.

He doesn’t like the administrative tasks related to finance, even though he’s good at doing them.

But the one thing he despises and is not good at is managing and administrating training delivery.

Then we simply hired a person for the new seat who liked doing those responsibilities.

The person in charge of automation was elevated to do other responsibilities and processes he excels in.

We’ll continue this series next week.

Stay tuned.