Delegation - achieving your goals together with others

My company is growing and together with my CTO and the rest of our team we just crafted a great 3-6 month plan of what we’re going to do and goals we’re going to accomplish. Everything sounds great and looks very promising… yet I need to make sure there isn’t anything standing in our way… like myself. I can’t be the bottleneck.

You can’t do it all alone…

A little earlier, in the beginning of January I set out to write everything I wanted to accomplish this year. On a personal and business level. After a few hours of writing goals and planning strategy I had it all figured out. I was proud of myself and presented it to my wife. She responded quickly: “I’m proud of you, dear, but did you also plan to sleep this year or you just decided to postpone it for 2014?” At first I didn’t get her joke… but then…

You can’t work non-stop, even with the best intentions

I realized she was right… It all sounded ambitious but I wouldn’t be able to accomplish this all by myself. Not by a long shot. I have a family with two kids, a life and I’m not a robot. Working non-stop is not sustainable (even if I wake up early in the morning). I really love my job… but I love my family, too :-)

Changing mindset - building teams for projects

This is when I changed my mindset. I started revising my plan and thinking what kind of “teams” can help me achieve each of my goals. Who would I need to do all that. Luckily, most of my projects can be done with my existing Nozbe team but this also made me re-think my approach and I started to delegate more stuff to them… and teach them about delegating so that they could leverage their own expertise and learn better to work “using each other” in a kind of way.

There is still a lot to learn, but I’ve got a great mentor :-)

That’s correct, my good friend and mentor Michael Hyatt has just published two fantastic episodes of his podcast about delegating, one about the art of delegating and the other about delegating even if you don’t have a staff.

Today, he published another great blog post about doing what you love which basically means focusing on your strengths and delegating everything else.

Now let’s practice delegating and synergizing and growing together!

What I discovered when I started delegating more is that people around me started aligning their goals with me and they happily accepted new responsibilities. Ultimately it’s all about growth - I want my CTO to be the best CTO there is, I want my programmers to be the best coding ninjas ever, I want my team to be the best it can be.

If I don’t delegate stuff to them, I fail them as a leader and I hinder their path of growth. You see, it works both ways, when you delegate you have more time to focus on your strengths but the “delegatees” grow more thanks to the new challenges and opportunities you give them.

This is something I want to practice and learn this year. Finally my mind is set correctly and our goals are within reach :-)

Question: What are your strengths? Are you delegating and giving more responsibilities to others? Maybe you should give more?