Why ‘it’s faster to do it myself’ is the most expensive mindset in leadership.

As a leadership coach, there are a few phrases I hear frequently. Here is one of them:

“I could delegate this, but it would take longer for me to explain how to do it than just do it myself.”

If you’ve ever thought or said that sentence, please read the rest of this article. Because while the statement is almost undoubtedly true, it’s totally missing the point, and it’s costing you more than you realize.

Why? Because when we fail to delegate, we fail to develop.

There’s a double meaning in that simple phrase. First, when we fail to delegate, we fail to develop our people. Without handing over tasks of increasing challenge and responsibility, your best team members will be stuck. They won’t grow their capacities, and over time, they’ll grow bored.

But when we fail to delegate, we also fail to develop ourselves. If we aren’t offloading work, then we aren’t making time for higher-level tasks, longer-term thinking, and more advanced work. We are failing to develop our own careers.

There’s no better time than the start of a new year to recommit yourself to developing your people, developing yourself, and getting more work done through delegation.

When clients tell me that delegation isn’t worth the time it takes, I have a series of exercises that can help them test that assumption. But you don’t need a leadership coach to try these exercises at home.

Below, I share my four best exercises for rethinking delegation; you can use all four together to make a powerful commitment to delegation this new year. Or, pick one and do it thoroughly. Either way, at the end, you’ll have less lower-level work on your plate, and a better prepared staff at your side.

#1: Imagine an unexpected turn of events (15 minutes)
Imagine a crisis situation where it doesn’t matter what else was on that week’s calendar; you’ve got to drop everything to care for something more urgent and important.

Maybe the scenario is a personal emergency, such as the unexpected hospitalization of an elderly parent, and you’re called upon to navigate the healthcare system and meet other family needs.

Maybe the scenario is a client emergency—your best client is suddenly threatening to walk away, and you must save the account.

Whatever scenario you imagine, the boundaries are this: you can take a little time to hand work over to someone else, but you cannot make time to do the work yourself. There just aren’t enough hours of the day, and there won’t be for the foreseeable future.

Now, look at your calendar and project list for the next season, and ask, what would I hand to someone else?

What would seem utterly ridiculous for you to do in these circumstances?

Write down your answers to these questions; then pick a team member to train, and get them prepared now, before an unexpected event actually occurs.

#2: Plot the present tasks (45 minutes)
You can do this next exercise as a continuation of the unexpected event above, or on its own. Begin by creating a complete list of all the projects, recurring meetings, and tasks that are on your plate. Then plot those activities on an Eisenhower Matrix.

Named for the World War II general and former US president, the Eisenhower Matrix asks us to evaluate our tasks by two factors: is it important or unimportant, and is it urgent or non-urgent? When you answer the question of importance, remember to answer this for you, not for the organization as a whole.

For example, the organization may require data for new vendors to be verified, by phone call, by a certain date each month. That’s urgent, in that the deadline is clear and approaching. It’s important to the organization, as well. But is it important to you, at your level? Probably not—delegate.

Once you’ve plotted your giant list of projects, have an honest conversation with yourself around the idea of importance. Turn over everything that is not important for you, at your level. Delegating will help develop your team members, and give you time for higher-level projects.

#3: Reflect with these questions (15 minutes)
If imagining scenarios and plotting tasks is too much work for your current state of mind, start with something simpler and just reflect on these questions.

• What routine and recurrent tasks are currently your responsibilities?
• What are some more challenging tasks or projects that someone else on your team is 70% ready for?
• What’s the highest and best use of your time? The work that would truly make a difference, if only you could get to it?
• How do others on your team need to grow? What could you give them that might help?
• Do I want these tasks off my plate or off our plate? Should we be doing it all?

#4: Identify and offer options
Once you’ve found some projects you could delegate, give options to your team members. The conversation might sound something like this, “Anna, I need to move a few things off my plate in the coming months. Here’s a list of five things I’d like to delegate—are there two or three you’d like to take on?”

You can also begin by asking your team members about their learning objectives and professional goals, and then identifying and assigning tasks for delegation that help advance their development agendas.

One other costly assumption leaders make about delegation

There’s another phrase that I hear frequently, when it comes to delegation:

“My team is already so swamped. I don’t want to overwhelm anyone by giving them more to do.”

We heard this phrase from several executives when working with a large global organization to create a survey for their employees.

In that survey, we asked the very busy team members to identify the ways they’d like to learn in the coming year. It was a multiple-choice question, with options like external training, attending industry conferences, and job shadowing.

Our team was surprised when one form of learning rose to the top: challenging work and stretch assignments.

These very busy team members made their message clear—give me work that helps me grow, and I’ll find time to do it.

Your people may feel the same way.

This new year, give up the old excuses and start delegating with eagerness. Delegate work so you develop their careers, and yours.

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