Delegate Already
My Responsibility
When I first took over the farm, one of the first responsibilities I assumed from my father was paying the bills. This process was something he had been doing for years. He had absorbed the Controller responsibilities when his prior employer had a difficult time finding a qualified candidate. So, he became the General Manager and Controller. I knew when I took over, one of my first hires would be a Controller, and one of the first delegations would be turning over the bill paying. Still, I was reluctant to turn over this responsibility and hesitated for several months after hiring our Controller.
It turns out I derive no energy from this activity. It took a long time to learn how to do this task, and it did not come naturally. In the meantime, I hired a Controller and turned over the majority of the accounting responsibilities, except, of course, paying the bills. I continued to perform this activity as it helped me understand our cash position and monitor our spending weekly. It took me almost one and half years to delegate this responsibility to the Controller. She was excited to have this added responsibility, and it fell in her core competencies. She enjoyed this role, where it was a significant source of stress for me.
How to Remove Bottlenecks
As the owner, I became a bottleneck in our administrative processes by not delegating the bill-paying role. I had so many other things pulling for my attention that spending a lot of time on a necessary task that I did not enjoy decreased our interoffice efficiency. The only way to remove this inefficiency or bottleneck is to delegate. The freedom I felt when trusting this role to the Controller gave me a boost of energy that I could channel in other business areas.
After I had appointed this process, I was left asking myself, "Why did I wait so long?" As I've contemplated this question, I keep coming back to trust. It was hard for me to let this go because I didn't trust that the Controller could do the job as well as I was. This idea was an absurd notion because I wasn't doing the job very well. Steven M. R. Covey said, "Trust is confidence born of two dimensions: character and competence." I certainly didn't question the character of the Controller. I trusted her to complete many other tasks that required high levels of honesty and integrity in dealing with employees' private and sensitive information. I knew she was competent because she completed other accounting responsibilities. So, I didn't question her competence. The bottom line is I had no precedent for not trusting her with this responsibility.
Passing It On
This experience taught me a lot about delegation. As I've matured as a leader, I have improved dramatically with how I delegate roles and responsibilities to all team members. In an ironic twist, the Controller mentioned previously has recently struggled with transferring some of her more time-consuming lower value tasks. I have asked her to train our receptionist on basic data entry and reporting to help increase her time for more high-value activities. Both she and the receptionist have shared the same feelings about this transition. The Controller has said things like, "I don't trust that she'll [the receptionist] will do it right and I'll have to go back and redo it." The receptionist has said, "She (the Controller) doesn't trust me enough to train me." It's my turn to teach this principle to the Controller while refraining from saying, "delegate already!"