I am pretty good at my job. I can do things quickly, efficiently, and consistently. I know what I want to do and I know how I want to do it. I have been in the mechanical industry for over a decade so the difficulty is rarely knowing what to do. If I have ignorance, I know of whom I need to ask the questions. I am at the point in my career when the limiter is myself.
The ability to do any of the given projects may be available within my skill set but I am still a finite person. I am the limit of how much can be accomplished. I only have so much time, so much bandwidth, so much energy, so much stamina. If I depend on myself fully then I am necessarily putting a boundary on what is possible.
It is time to learn how to delegate. When I delegate I am expanding the boundaries of what is possible because I have a team I can depend on. I can then manage my delegation and what we can do together is far more than we can do as individuals.
Here is the rub. Delegation involves training. It is involves trust. It involves knowing something will not be done as quickly or as well or as expected because the knowledge base, experience, or abilities are different.
Therein lies the tension. I can be satisfied with the limits of my own abilities and keep the intimate knowledge of how I will do something. Or I can let go of some of the results and expand what can be accomplished.
The latter involves being required to engage in new actions that I don’t currently have to do: training, mentoring, following up with, holding accountable. But what I lose in independence I gain in growth.
This may seem like an exercise in greed. How can I do more as a team so I can gain more as a sales person? But that is actually not a consideration for me. My mind goes to how can I better help customers and how can I ensure I give myself the bandwidth to do the things I am put on this earth to do that are not necessarily the 9-5 job. For the former a team can tackle far more problems than an individual. I am leveling up, so to speak, so I can surmount even bigger difficulties for my customers. Not to mention they gain a more capable partner to whom they can delegate.
As for the latter, if I don’t delegate the temptation would be to have my working hours bleed into the hours that should be for other things, starting earlier, ending later, working on things on the weekend. Delegation, in this respect, is really a stewardship of my time and resources for better ends.
And the growth for myself gained from delegating may be worth the whole exercise on its own. It is full of hard conversations and getting out of my own comfort zone. I can decide to remain who I am because it is comfortable or I can press into gaining maturity and character formation knowing I have opportunity to gain virtue, or hone virtue, that I do not currently have.
Three cheers for delegation.