Delegating. The leadership skill to help prevent burnout

I’ve coached hundreds of founders and leaders over the years and one common mistake I see time and time again is around ownership & delegation. Especially with early-stage first-time founders who are handcuffed to the idea that they must do everything. The marketing, hiring, sales, and everything in between. The first piece of advice I share is to break things down into 4 categories: 1) Things I’m good at 2) Things I enjoy 3) Things I don’t know well 4) Things I don’t enjoy. They take the first two and then must outsource or delegate the latter 2 immediately. For today, I’d like to focus on delegation & ownership and how it can be the unlock for preventing burnout, huge increases in productivity, and far more engaged employees.

Let’s start off with our biblical source of how owning everything will lead to burnout and how delegating and giving ownership will save the world. In last week’s Torah portion, we read the story about Jethro (Moses’s father-in-law) seeing and being astonished by Moses’s daily routine. From sunrise to sunset, Moses would sit and mediate disagreements, answer questions, and similar all day long. If you ever thought the queue at the post office was long, you ain’t seeing nothing! Then Jethro comes to offer us one of the first recorded examples of mentorship (why every leader needs a mentor and for a separate post). He tells Moses that by continuing this way every day, he’ll burn out. If he burns out he’ll be of no help to himself or the entire nation. Not good! He recommends creating multiple tiers of leaders to hear the cases. When one level of leaders can’t solve the inquiry it goes to the higher level. And finally ends up with Moses in those one-off cases. Sounds pretty familiar to how the Supreme Courts work, right? I wonder where they learned that from?!?! Like the court systems of many countries, each level of court is given the authority to make decisions.

So we learn 3 important things here that are relevant to every leader today. The first is by delegating to others you’re not overwhelmed every day with way too much work and too many decisions. So you don’t burn out! Second, by taking stuff off of your plate, you’re able to focus on the big picture stuff rather than the nitty-gritty details. You can get your entire nation to the promised land or for company leaders a successful exit. Finally, you give ownership to the delegates to make the decisions needed. You should provide the overall strategy and guidelines but the team makes the decisions. Let’s break each of these down and the impact they can have.

Delegate to put out the 🔥 of burnout

In a 2021 report by DDI of nearly 16000 leaders, 60% reported feeling burnt out at the end of each day. Of those 9600 burnt-out leaders, 44% stated they expected to switch jobs in the not-too-distant future. I’ve felt this countless times in my career for multiple reasons. Let’s look at a couple of the most common cases. First, is the dreaded synchronous meeting 🙀. I’ll give you an example. For a couple of years at various companies I ran the voice of customer meetings. Voice of Customer is crucial to share invaluable customer insights and feedback with your internal teams like Product, Engineering, and management. While these meetings were very valuable they were highly costly for me. First, I had to create the reports pulling data for things like the number of tickets linked to feature requests, bugs, or the number of help center article views and searches. Next, I had to create a presentation around this data. As a leader, I had little interaction with customers (I’ve always jumped into the queue for a couple of tickets weekly but that’s not enough). Thus I didn’t have the same finger on the pulse of the customers as my front-line team had. So I needed to set up additional time, meetings, or Slack threads to gain a better understanding of the data.

Another example was with my Customer Success team. We had just launched and were continuously working to get a conversation with our customers. Something that hadn’t happened in years prior and why my CS team was created. Email campaigns, QBRs, virtual training, and other ideas came up on how to get that meeting. Just imagine what goes into each of these. The subject line and the right content for the emails. Sync vs async QBRs, how many slides and of what data. Live training vs pre-recorded training.

A final example was like most SaaS companies, the various companies I’ve worked with had a no-refund policy. But every week, customers for one reason or another (most of the time great reasons) requested refunds. Each time, the Support rep would ask for my approval/denial of the request.

These simply took me away from higher priority and bigger impact things I should have been working on. I would also feel burnt out at the end of a day or week that I didn’t get things done because much of my focus was placed elsewhere. I even felt this sometimes in my last role where I ran my teams async by default and on a 4-day work week. Every other Thursday I’d create the async 1:1s for 6-7 people on my teams. This took hours but saved more hours being async. On good Thursdays when there weren’t various sync meetings throughout the day I could normally get these done on Thursday. Thus enjoying a 3-day weekend. But for many weeks that didn’t happen, and I had to create these async 1:1s on Friday. Adding more stress on my ‘day off’ and before the Sabbath which is always hectic. So the added stress really tired me out.

Let’s see how over time I addressed these by delegating to my team & giving ownership.

Delegating so you can see the view from 20,000ft vs 10ft 🔭

We mentioned above that delegating helps you see the big picture. How the small cogs play into the bigger wheel. How feature request tickets lead into the product roadmap and marketing campaigns to be created. That’s of course when you’re focused on the 20,000ft view. Though we may have the experience of being a Support rep or UX designer it doesn’t mean we should spend a good chunk of our days answering tickets or editing design files. Leaders are better off explaining why tagging/linking Support tickets is important. Or how fewer steps in a workflow or bigger CTA buttons can impact onboarding and reducing churn. Giving the Why to your team to understand how the work they are doing impacts the bigger picture.

When the Israelites were instructed to create the Mishkan (tabernacle and the precursor to Solomon’s temple) one person was put in overall charge. G-d gifted him with creative abilities in fabrics, jewels, metallurgy, and everything else required. Just imagine what goes into building a house and how many people are involved. An architect to design it, an engineer to come up with the building plan, foreman to lead all the contractors. A person who lays the pipes, and someone who does the electricity. Each person knows their specific job. In our biblical case, Betzalel was gifted with it all. We’re told he could do it all but the last sentence is the most important.

Though Bezalel knew how to do each and every job he was placed as the foreman. Allowing him to see how getting the metal poles, the rings of a certain size, and the curtain to the right length would make the Mishkan perfect.

The military is probably the best example we can use to properly illustrate this. There’s a reason why Generals are away from the battleground and your lower-ranked officers (NCOs) are on the front line. The NCOs can see where the shooting is coming from, where they need to move their troops, or what immediate help is needed. Only the Generals who see the entire battlefront can see where all the units are. And how and what the impact would be moving a unit of tanks or planes to support the ground troops. Or where the enemy is coming from elsewhere to determine the unit on the ground should retreat and move elsewhere. An NCO may be able to see how to win a specific battle but without the context of the General, they’d likely lose the war. Here’s Jocko Willink better describing it 👇️

@motimoree

Strategic Means Big Picture Jocko Willink #motimoree #motivation #learn #selflearn #motivate #motivationalmonday #jockowillink #BigPicture #Strategic

Hand over the keys to your team to own delegated items 🔑

So as a leader how do you focus on the 20,000ft view to prevent burnout and ensure the grander vision is realized via delegation successfully? The answer is ownership. Giving your team ownership of the tasks they are asked to handle. Let’s walk through each of the cases at the top to highlight how I gave ownership to my team.

Let’s start with the best example of ownership in the Jewish world; Chabad. Rabbi Schneerson (the Rebbe) pushed the idea of sending shalichim (community ambassadors) to the 4 corners of the world to support even the smallest community or group of Jews wherever they are. They are truly oasises in many deserts. For example, every Passover the Chabad of Nepal & Thailand each host a Passover seder for 2000+ Israelis (traveling after the army).

Each Chabad house (or mini community) is provided the overall guidance & mission by the organization. Yet, each shaliach (ambassador) is responsible for creating their own community. It could be for university students on campus, in the middle of the Himalayas for trekking Israelis, or any use case in between. Each ambassador creates their own events, shares content, raises money, and all the pieces involved in building community on their own. They understand the needs, resources, and limitations in their unique community. So each shaliach is given the ownership of building their house & community in the best way they see fit. It simply aligns to the bigger grand vision set by the leadership above.

So to my use cases…

The voice of customer

Someone on my Support teams tended to have an interest in moving to Product in the future. So as part of their career trajectory (another post), the VoC was eventually handed over to them. I initially created the data, presentation, and process around sharing internally. I then invited the person from my team to the meetings and pre-meeting sessions working together to put the data together and talk through the points. I then handed ownership over to them to collate the data, present it, and run the meetings (sync or async). I shared the why (the importance of VOC, goals, and impact). I gave overall guidance on what data needed to be provided. I let them own how it was presented and what format to move forward. I stayed involved async to keep aligned and informed. It allowed me to understand high-level product vision feedback and have impactful conversations internally while not spending hours on data prep and presentation.

Customer Success Engagement

Trying to get out behind the 8-ball we needed to try everything and get creative in getting responses and meetings with our customers. Because I didn’t own the specific customer relationships so wouldn’t be contacting them directly. I didn’t need to own the communication. I wanted everyone on my team to have and share their own voice. I shared the high-level strategy of focusing on value-driven engagement. Meaning every mail we send has to provide some value proposition to the customer reading it. For example, the QBR (Quarterly Business Review). There’s a ton of value in sharing usage data, testimonials, and more from the customer to the account champions and owners. Rather than me stating here’s a template the team should use, I focused on strategy. For example, for customers with poor usage we focused on $ and hours saved and what those numbers could be if we could boost usage. I hosted a meeting where we kicked off a few brainstorming ideas. They then created the content as a team and individuals to share with their customers. Using this approach in 4 months, we received hundreds of replies, tens of meetings, and 7 up-sells handed over to Sales.

Refund policy

I’ve been the believer that we shouldn’t hijack people’s money. So if a user didn’t use the product in the mentioned timeframe we automatically refunded them. Customers would come in 6 months later and want refunds. In some cases, they used it for the first 3-4 months but wanted a full refund. In other cases, they didn’t use it for more than 6 months. So I shared why it’s good business to refund (NPS & CSAT) and simple guidance and ownership. Whatever each person felt comfortable with themselves refunding, go for it! If they weren’t comfortable ask the team. If that too didn’t get a response I was happy to help. After setting this ownership policy, I was rarely asked but most of these tickets got Happy feedback ratings.

If you’d like to read more about ownership I’ll go with Jocko Willink again and 1 of the best books you can read Extreme Ownership. The book provides guidelines to excel in leadership roles and enabling teams rather than micromanaging.

One of the central topics covered in the book is Decentralized Command. This method provides team members with a clear set of areas they have ownership of while in combat and/or on the battlefield.

If you’re a leader who embraces delegation and ownership I’d love to hear your use cases.

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