Have You Delegated And Been Burnt… Do This Differently…

I have a client who’s got trust issues. It’s stopping him letting go of stuff at work, and it’s costing him a bunch of money and a bunch of time to the point where he’s been successful, but he can’t see how he will be successful in the future.

When I say to him, “You know what? Why can’t you let your stuff go?” Because it makes logical sense, right? He goes, “Well, I did.” I said, “Well, what happened?”

He goes, “It didn’t work.” “Why? what happened?” “Well, they didn’t do it to my standard, and they didn’t follow through the right time.” I said, “Well, who do you care about? Who’s expectations matter?” For him, it’s his clients.

The Problem

The problem with that is all the work’s going to come in from his clients. He’s going to have to do it all, and he’s got no ability to scale. But if he could find a way to get himself to trust and let go, he’s got unlimited capacity to scale. Sound familiar? What I’m going to talk about is what happens when you’ve been burnt through delegation and what you can do differently to free yourself up, so you can scale.

How to free yourself up

Here’s the thing. With my friend, he was very unhappy. Very unhappy. He’s asking himself the question of, “Can I do this again?” He literally kind of had that face. You may be asking yourself that question, too, because you’ve been burnt. It sucks when people let you down, but it happens. Here’s the mindset shift, and this is the way I explain it to him.

Firstly, he values relationships with clients. He’s him. He aims to keep the trust high here, partly because they pay the bills and partly because that’s where his focus is. With his team, the trust is low because he’s been burnt in the past. But here’s the thing, I don’t know about any of your work with clients or whoever it is that pays you money, keeps the lights on, is clients turnover.

We don’t keep clients forever, but for some reason he thinks, that’s okay with clients. That’s what happens. But if my team do it, “Ah, no. I could never ever trust them again. No way! I’ll never ever trust them again.” Your job as a leader is to build trust with your team and to build trust with your clients.

The second job is to build redundancy because things change. The way we build redundancy with clients is with a pipeline, right? You know you’re not going to keep clients forever, so you’ve got to have things coming in the future.

The way we build redundancy with our team is to build systems, to build processes, and to build training that sits on a repository somewhere that the next person could access if your team did turn over. Starting to make sense for you?

Summary

• Your job as a leader is to build trust with both your team and your clients. Trust your team and free yourself up, and start focusing on scaling your business.
• Remember, we don’t keep clients forever and it’s never okay to lose team members.
• We need to build redundancy into the way we lead and manage so that we can bring new people in when we need to.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch 

Hopefully, this has been a revelation for you. Hopefully, this has been a moment where you can go, “You know what? I can let go.” If it has, I want you to sneakily, cheekily down below send me a note. What is it you’re going to delegate first? How are you going to trust? How are you going to build redundancy into your system? Talk to you soon on The Reason & The Road.