Wubbleyou’s Post

I used to struggle with delegation, this dev maxim changed that: Make the change easy, then make the easy change. Sometimes in software, a part of it can be really hard to work on, changing it is scary. Sometimes you find yourself changing the hard thing over and over, and it’s a slog. It's hard to delegate without high risk. In those situations, it’s beneficial to step back, and invest time rewriting it so that change becomes easy, and actually enjoyable to make. Easy to the point where change makes you feel like an artisan, a surgeon – the change is so effortless and fluent, you feel like master of your craft when you work on it. I think this applies in business growth too: Make the change easy, then DELEGATE the easy change. This usually means, investing time to bake knowledge and capability into an underlying asset to get it going, then delegating management of that. A challenge with delegation can be that you’re an industry leader, very knowledgeable about stuff, and you’re delegating to smart people but with less knowledge. Which is entirely natural. However, that can create frustration when it’s not clear how to do it properly. Delegation can fall into 3 camps: 🎯 “Here is a strategic objective, achieve it” 🎯 “Go fix that problem” 🎯 “Do this specific thing” “Do this specific thing”, is normally delegation of essential but lower value activities, delegated to free up time. If the business is growing quickly, it’s not well documented and is just done from memory. The delegate can receive a crappy description on how to do it and lacks the knowledge to fill in the gaps. The delegator is then unimpressed when the job isn’t done properly, the delegate feels set up to fail, no one is happy. Where I can get away with it, I’d normally create a Loom video showing how to do it, and the task is to turn that into a process in Notion and keep doing it. But that doesn’t always work – the thing is sometimes too hard. 🧠 Example: Until 2023 our Ops Manual was hard to update if you were not a developer. I’d delegated an objective to create a single source of truth for project management, but it was slow, hard work for the people involved. I spent a weekend migrating the entire Ops Manual to Notion, which was far easier to use. Barrier removed, progress sped up considerably. 🧠 Example: We’ve only really been marketing the business in earnest for 18 months. We brought in help, and the questions were always: “What’s the message you want to get out? What stories do you want to tell? What do you want the readers to do?” Good questions. We then spent months incrementally building a bank of assets, including stories, imagery, presentations, actions to take, videos - reusable assets. It’s now far easier to do/delegate, easy to change if we need to. We create a lot of content around how to turn scaling business owners into innovators, join here to see more! https://lnkd.in/eTc7Y5JN #scaleups #Newcastle #Innovators