Should We Delegate?
If you were to ask somebody if there are things that you are doing that you could train somebody else to do for you, what would you say?
If you ask the average leader, the average small business owner, the average personal brand, or the average executive if there are things that you do regularly that they could train somebody else to do for you, what do you think most of us would say?
Do you think we would say no and that a hundred percent of what I do could only be done by me?
Or do you think most of us would say there are things that I am doing that other people could do?
Most of us would have enough self-awareness to agree that there are some things that I do that other people could be trained in how to do.
If you are aware of the idea that other people could be trained in how to do the things that you are doing, then why haven’t you done that?
Why haven’t you found a person? Why haven’t you trained them? Why haven’t you given this to another person?
And most of us would say one of the two things. We would typically say it is just faster or better if I did it myself. In other words, it is just easier for me to do it.
Nobody can do it quite as I can.
And this becomes one of the most pervasive, striking, and destructive limiting beliefs of all leaders.
It is the thing that holds not only themselves back, but it holds other people back that are around them.
And not only does it hold other people back, but it also holds their entire mission back because they have attached the entire mission to themselves.
They believe that they are the only people who can advance this mission forward.
It is a limiting belief, and it took me a long time to learn this.
I struggled with it.
How to Shift Your Thinking
I want to introduce to you something called the 30x rule.
What we are going to do here is we are going to do, in a logical way, a break down this assumption of this idea of whether it is faster for you to do it yourself.
Here is what the 30x rule suggests. The idea with the 30x rule is you spend 30 times the amount of time it takes you to do a task when training someone to do it for you.
Spend 30 times the amount of time it takes you to do it when training someone else to do the task for you.
I am going to walk you through an illustration here so that this makes sense.
For example, let us say that you have a task that takes you five minutes a day to do the task.
The 30x rule suggests that you should consider spending 150 minutes training someone to do that task instead of five minutes doing it yourself.
This is, honestly, where we lose a lot of people because they look at it and they think that is the dumbest thing they have ever heard.
That makes no sense.
Why in the world would I spend 150 minutes (about 2 and a half hours), training somebody to do a task that I could just do myself in five minutes?
That does not make sense.
And you know what?
You are right.
It never makes sense to trade two and a half hours for five minutes unless you make the significance calculation.
Absent the significance calculation, we inadvertently outweigh the urgency calculation.
When we live in a paradigm of one day, the urgency calculation will never make sense to trade two and a half hours for five minutes.
It never will but remember the significance calculation changes everything.
The significance calculation changes everything.
The significance calculation is about looking through a longer-term lens.
What we are going to do is an actual empirical analysis of the significance calculation as it pertains to this exact example, and we will see what we find.
The trick is, if you apply the significance calculation here for just one year, what you realize is that if you spend five minutes a day on the task, and there are approximately 250 working days in a year, then for one year, you are going to spend 1,250 minutes (about 21 hours) doing that task over just one year.
Isn’t that interesting?
In one moment, this looks completely different because it never makes sense to trade 150 minutes for five, but it makes sense to trade in 150 minutes if you are going to get 1,250 minutes back.
Notice how the answer to whether you should delegate is obvious.
This is just as obvious as what it was before, but it was the complete opposite of how it originally looked.
The task has not changed. People have not changed. The only thing that has changed is the leaders’ thinking.
That is why we say the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking.
Everything else stays the same.
While it is obvious not to trade 150 minutes for five minutes, it is obvious for 1,250 minutes.
If you do not consciously make that calculation, if you do not deliberately calculate that out into the future, your brain will automatically be evaluating just inside of the paradigm of today.
How about you? Has this shifted your level of thinking? I would love to know in the comments below.
