Over the years, I’ve hosted dozens of mission teams, both in foreign countries and here at home. I’ve also been a part of more than I can count. And my biggest problem with these kind of service-based missions? Getting enough things to do to keep my teams busy.
It’s true that volunteers often accomplish more than we imagined in a significantly shorter period of time. That’s a good problem to have. But the result is not: people working below their capacity, waiting for more to do, while important things still remain undone.
It usually leaves the leader frazzled: running around to gather supplies, find tools, and come up with more things people can do. (Can I get an Amen?) In the end, it undermines those who are there to work, and overwhelms the leader who is trying to keep them busy while neglecting his primary responsibilities.
The truth is: you’ll always have more to do than you can possibly do alone. And whether you’re hosting volunteers, serving in church ministry, corporate life, or running a household or a small business, there’s no doubt your to-do list can be overwhelming. I know. I’ve written about it here.
But I’ve recently realized I was trying to solve it all wrong. As a leader, with a strong team, I was reviewing my to-do list daily, looking for tasks I could hand off—or delegate—to one of the more-than-competent members of my team.
It created two primary problems:
- It was undermining the ability, skills and potential for leadership of my team members.
- I was still overwhelmed by my own never-ending to-do list.
My entire team was functioning below our true capacity. Something had to change, and it had to start with me.
I needed a better system.
My first major realization was that I needed to use a clear system for delegation that everyone understood. People need to know the true expectations of them, and nothing I’ve heard or read handles it better than Michael Hyatt’s post on the Five Levels of Delegation.
These levels range from “Do exactly what I have asked you to do” all the way to “Make whatever decision you think is best.” Frequently, the people I was delegating to thought we were on one level, while I thought we were on another.
I needed to delegate more responsibilities and less tasks.
The second aha was when I realized that I (and the managers I lead) was pretty much camped out at the lowest level of delegation. We were all delegating tasks, or passing off projects, in order to shorten our to-do lists. But they were never getting shorter, just passed around.
Good delegation is not just about clear communication and expectations, it’s about being willing to entrust responsibility to others. As soon as we started talking about delegated responsibility, great things started happening:
- People took ownership. It became their project and their tasks, to an end they would get credit for.
- To-do lists got shorter because the people closest to the tasks did what needed to be done before those things ever made it to a manager’s list.
- Managers and directors started focusing on what only they could do. With responsibility for daily operations appropriately delegated, they were suddenly—we literally saw the change within a day—able to focus on big-picture planning, systems, processes, and the personal development of their teams.
It’s been great to see our staff not only embrace the responsibility, but deliver amazing results at every level of detail. And it’s been amazing to see my to-do list shrink at the same time. Now, the number one thing in my to-do list: delegate more responsibility.
