Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2615 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Learn To Delegate? I Don’t Trust People To Meet My Expectations About this episode Feeling swamped with tasks that only you can handle, like passing them off would end in disaster? Frank posed a great question about how to tackle this—trusting others to match your high standards can feel impossible. But guess what? That doesn’t have to be your reality. In this lesson, Omar dives into the art of […] The post MBA2615 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Learn To Delegate? I Don’t Trust People To Meet My Expectations appeared first on The $100 MBA.
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0:59 Speaker 02 If you ever thought, no one can do it as well as I can, or it's faster if I just do it myself, or I can't afford to hire somebody right now. You're not alone. But if you don't learn to delegate and give others ownership, you'll never escape the grind. Today, we're going to change your mindset about delegation and give you practical steps. Practical steps that are going to help you start trusting others and give them ownership and start growing your business the right way. Let's dive in.
1:34 Speaker 02 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, to help you start, grow and scale your business.
1:47 Speaker 02 Here's the truth. If you're doing everything yourself, you're building a prison, not a business. You think you're protecting your standards, but what you're really doing is creating a system where you are the bottleneck. The problem is that a lot of us do this without even noticing. You can't scale, you can't take time off. You're always busy, but you're not moving the business forward. This is not entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs build systems. They leverage other people's time, skills, and effort to grow a business. Entrepreneurs know that it isn't a feeling, it's a system. Okay, you're creating an asset, leveraging other people's talent and skills to produce wealth for you, to produce a result for you.
2:32 Speaker 02 If you are the system, you don't have a system. If you want to stop trading time for money and build something that can grow beyond you, you need to make a shift. You need to make a shift from self-employment to entrepreneurship. Delegation isn't just about handing off tasks. It's about giving others ownership over those responsibilities. When you delegate properly, you free yourself to focus, to focus on high-value activities. You create space to work on your business and not in it. And you empower others to take full responsibility for the results. And here's the real kicker. If you're delegating tasks, you're still in the driver's seat.
3:15 Speaker 02 If you're delegating ownership, you're building leaders who can own the outcomes and the full task and everything around it. So your goal isn't to hand off work. Your goal is to create owners who take full responsibility for the work, so you're not needed for every decision. And that's how you build a business that runs without you. I mean, let's get honest. Why don't you trust others? You think no one can do it as well as you. You're afraid of mistakes and failure. You've been burnt before, possibly. But the truth is, is that you're right. You are right. No one is going to do as well as you. And that mistakes can happen. You gotta get over that. You gotta get over the fact that somebody's gonna do things exactly like you.
4:00 Speaker 02 It's a good thing that people are different, right? Different doesn't mean- Worse mistakes are part of the learning curve as well, by the way. And one bad experience doesn't mean all hires are bad. This is something you have to learn in business over time. When you make a decision and the result is not what you want, it doesn't mean the decision is bad. It means the result is bad. That's it. Means you mean to make a few tweaks in your execution of that decision, and you'll find a better result. The problem isn't people. It's your system because people can follow a system if you give it to them. You need a delegation system that sets people up for success to make sure that, hey, my system won't fail me. I know that I created a system that anybody can just implement and do.
4:45 Speaker 02 So I want to share with you five practical steps to delegate effectively and give ownership to your people. So get ready to stop being a bottleneck. And now we're going to start delegating the right way and give full ownership. Number one, identify low value, repeatable tasks. Start by making a list. Write down every task you do in a week. You want to highlight tasks that generate $10 to $100. I call these $10 tasks, $100 tasks. Think about how much money does this task actually produce for the business? And this is just an estimate. These are the first things you need to delegate immediately. Okay? If the task doesn't drive revenue or growth in a dramatic way, then it's a candidate for delegation immediately. And don't be afraid to cut things out completely.
5:28 Speaker 02 Like, don't do those things anymore if they're not really beneficial. But here is the key. Don't just hand off the task. Give ownership of the outcome. Let them own the result, not just the process. So for example, if you have somebody on your team that's responsible for publishing your weekly newsletter, for sending it out to your email list subscribers, they have to own the result, they have to own the task. They are responsible to make sure that email gets sent at this time every single week properly to every person that's on the list. They got to figure it out using your system to make that result happen. Step two, create a system before you delegate. The system is actually more important than the task. Don't just hand over tasks, set people up for success.
6:13 Speaker 02 Document the process, record a screen recording video, use a loom or you can use like Zeit, or if you don't want to do video, write step-by-step instructions. But I think the video is quite easy to use because then there's a visual, there's an audio, and you can transcribe the audio. Define what success looks like. Be crystal clear on the desired outcome. What is the desired outcome for this task? And then lastly, create a feedback loop, giving them a way to ask questions and improve that system. By the way, the creation of the system, once you shoot the video, is their responsibility. It's their system. They're the ones who are going to have to use it to get the outcome. A system removes the guesswork and builds
6:56 Speaker 02 trust over time. And then you can look over the system to make sure everything is the way you want it to be. So when they watch the video and document like an SOP in a Google Doc, these are the steps of the task, is what I have to do to get this outcome, you can review that doc to make sure that it's on point. By doing this, the person on your team that you're delegating to owns the whole process. And when somebody owns a process with a system, they take responsibility for the outcome. Pretty cool. I know we're kicking out of systems and ownership and all that kind of stuff, but this is part of business. Business is a set of systems.
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7:58 Speaker 03 What do I gift my mom and nieces?
8:00 Speaker 05 Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disneyland.
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8:14 Speaker 03 And my coffee-obsessed bestie?
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8:20 Speaker 03 All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?
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8:24 Speaker 01 Shop gifts, no love at Walmart.
8:30 Speaker 02 Number three, start small and build trust with ownership. Okay, you don't have to delegate everything overnight. Start with a small, low stake tasks that is not going to kill your business if it goes wrong. Give them one task and see how they handle it. Give them one thing that they can create a system and an SOP for and get them to do it. Check the system, check their work, and then slowly build up trust as they prove themselves every time they own something new. Test a task and then if they succeed, give them another task. And then if they succeed, give them full ownership of that area, all the tasks in that area of your business. And ownership again means they make decisions, they fix mistakes, they improve the process over time.
9:14 Speaker 02 And when they own it, you're free to focus on growth, not the task anymore. Number four, hire for strengths and not just skills. Here's where most people go wrong. They hire based on skills alone, but they forget to consider strengths and mindset. Skills can be taught, like I could teach somebody how to do anything really, but attitude, work ethic, adaptability, these are where the magic happen. Okay, this is what you really should be hiring for because you can really pass on any skill on to anybody, but you can't teach somebody to have a good attitude, have a good work ethic, to be flexible, to be adaptable, to be a listener. Hire people that love doing what you hate doing, right?
9:57 Speaker 02 They're passionate about something like a calendar management. And when you find them, give them full ownership of that area. Let them drive improvements and the results that you're looking for without micromanagement. They're gonna surprise you, trust me. Number five, probably the most important one, let go and embrace imperfection. This is the hardest part. You have to let go. You have to allow for mistakes to happen so people can learn. You have to trust the process. Perfection is the enemy of progress. If you want to scale, if you want to give others the space to learn and grow, you need to let them do that. You know how you complained about how things weren't perfect at your old company that you worked for? They too learn that perfection is not the goal.
10:42 Speaker 02 Progress and profit is, okay? They are willing for some things not to be perfect. They know that, they know things are not perfect. It's not like we're all just kind of like geniuses. Oh, I can't believe they do it this way. You could definitely do it that way. Yeah, they can do it that way. But again, you gotta pick your battles in business sometimes. Sometimes it's just not worth all the effort to make it 100%. To make it 95% is actually good enough and great enough for you to have a successful business. And by trying to get that last 5%, you're exhausting energy and effort that could be used in something more important. And this all means giving ownership to not just the task again, okay? You gotta give ownership to the responsibility.
11:25 Speaker 02 And that means that sometimes the result of that ownership transfer is they're not gonna get it perfect, okay? Especially in the beginning, they're not gonna get it perfect. Ownership means mistakes will happen. But you can fix mistakes. They can be fixed even without you, okay? They're gonna recognize there's a mistake and then they're gonna fix it. They're gonna learn. Ownership means someone else has invested in the outcome and therefore they don't wanna have mistakes on their plate. They don't wanna have mistakes on the record, right? Ownership means that you get your life back, right? As a, as a business owner. So focus on progress over perfection. Done is better than perfect, in my opinion, because when you get stuck in that loop of trying to make everything perfect, you don't progress, you don't actually move on. You get stuck.
12:09 Speaker 02 Now, don't get me wrong. We're a company that believes that the details matter. And we work hard on refining the details over time, okay? We know that our first version is not gonna be as good as our second, or third, or fifth. And we wanna get to that beautiful, detail-oriented, gorgeous outcome. But we understand out the gate, we need to get started. We need to put things out there, make mistakes, learn through trial and error, learn through the market what they want. We can't just hope it to be perfect from day one or from the start of the whole process of any task. No, we have to admit the fact that it will not be perfect. And that's okay. We are moving forward. Trust isn't about feelings, it's about systems and processes.
12:52 Speaker 02 Here's how to build a system that fosters that trust and creates ownership. You want to set clear, clear expectations, define tasks, outcomes, and deadlines. Clarity and communication is key when it comes to delegation. Two, regular check-ins, schedule a weekly meeting or bi-weekly reviews, or even in the beginning, daily stand-ups. We used to do this in our company, Webinar Ninja. We would have our engineering team every day for 10 minutes and make sure that everybody's on the same page. Give feedback early and often. Just-in-time learning is our motto in our company. You want to correct small mistakes before they become big problems. And we all understand that we have a checker egos on the door and we're just giving feedback so we all get better.
13:36 Speaker 02 We're all working towards the same goal. When people know what's expected, they know how they're doing, they know how to win, trust follows naturally. And when they own their work, they're invested in making it better. Now, here comes the exciting part. When you delegate effectively and give ownership, you free yourself from the grind. You have a system now that runs your business with the right talent that you don't need to worry about anymore. Now you can do other things, whether it's things in your life or things that bring in more money in your business. You get to focus on high-level strategy and growth, as you should, right? And you create a business that runs without you. And that's the ultimate goal, isn't it? To stop being self-employed and start being a true entrepreneur.
14:20 Speaker 02 Let me just level with you here. You don't build a great business alone. You build it with a team. If you want to scale, you need to trust others. If you want to create freedom, you need to delegate ownership. If you want to create and build wealth, you need leverage. Let go, build trust, and create ownership in your business. And you're going to watch your business grow beyond what you even thought was possible. That's what I found. Once I recognized the way I'm going to compete with my competition is with building a stronger team, that was my differentiator, everything changed.
14:54 Speaker 02 If you're ready to master delegation, scale your business and scale your mindset, you're going to want to join my three things newsletter. Every week I send you three things, right? Three things, one, something to think about, two, something to do, and three, something to learn. It's a way for me to coach you from afar and give you the tools to succeed. Just go to 100mba.net and sign up for any of our free guides and you'll get added to our newsletter automatically. I'm Omar Zenhome. Delegate, give ownership, don't be greedy, and scale your business. And you'll see that this is going to be a pivotal moment in your business where you start shifting things and you start growing, scaling, and building an asset that works for you. Thanks so much. I'll check you in the next episode.
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