Doing vs delegating

The role of a founder doesn’t really exist. Instead it’s an ever changing series of roles.

Many founders will experience a journey that looks something like this:

(1) Doing: founding team — doing everything

(2) Doing & delegating: founding team — managing a small growing team + doing the roles they haven’t yet hired for

(3) Delegating: established exec team managing a large growing organisation

Growing the team is essential for scale. And yet trusting and delegating to others can be an uncomfortable transition, particularly for passionate perfectionists!

The below distinction taken from Steven Covey’s book (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) might help.

Two types of delegation

Gofer Delegation — Focuses on specific instructions for the method (the how, what and when) of completing a task.

Stewardship Delegation — Focuses on the outcome required of a task rather than the method to achieve it.

Gofer delegation is most common (and effective) in repetitive production type environments. In a knowledge worker economy where we hire the best people to use their smarts to achieve our goals, Stewardship delegation is not only more efficient (for the delegator) and motivating (for the…