Jeff Lail

Neglected to post this when I posted the videos….
enjoy!

Here’s why I think delegating is hard for people…1) I think they underestimate the amount of work that goes into events. 2) they think that giving other people work to do means admitting weakness or inability to “handle” it. 3) they don’t trust others to get the work done – this one is huge.

In my undergraduate roles especially, I was placed in charge of two organizations, the entertainment council had a budget of around $120,000 and was planning several huge events and multiple smaller events throughout the year. While I had veto power over every event, I recognized that it wasn’t good for me or the organization to have me doing everything. For example, there were ridiculous amounts of paperwork that went into every event, much like here! We had to fill out paperwork for checks, paper work to get tables, paperwork to reserve spaces and paper work after the event in the form of thank yous and accounting. All of this was very time consuming and most of it was fairly simple to do. I gave a lot of these task to students that were freshman that I had recruited to assist me with the board. For example, rather than filling out every check request for the board for the year, I would train one freshman how to do checks and then she was in charge of checks for the year. Another student was in charge of thank you notes, and another student was in charge of the facilities paperwork for each event. Instead of having me going to do every little piece of paperwork, I would have them fill things out while I made phone calls to event promoters, met with administrators and handled the “big picture” parts of the event. A good leader knows what is critical for them to handle so that their event or organization retains coherence while knowing what could be better done by someone with a bit of initiative and a bit of education.

Even while doing this, I was still spending 20 hours per week approximately, working on our events. But I would have been spending almost 40 if I hadn’t given these other people some responsibilities.
One important thing to keep in mind is that you WILL leave at some point. If you’re like me, you pour your heart and your soul into your organization, thinking about it in class, at meals and in the shower. It consumes far more of your time than your office hours because you love it and you want it to run well. There’s nothing wrong with this. However, you must learn to let go of your organization. You don’t want to be the old member that is getting calls 10 times a week to ask how they do such and such, or leave the organization in such a shambles when you leave that there’s no one to run it. You have the power to make your organization strong after you leave by allowing other people to do work, and when they show the ability to do simple work, give them the power to do more and bigger responsibilities.

TRUTH: you are failing as a leader if you fail to prepare your organization for your leaving. I know Asher Roth said that he’d love to stay in college forever, and I’m sure we’ve all felt that way at one time or another, but time marches on and eventually we have to go get a real job and make real money and maybe even buy a real car. Dont’ let your organization suffer because you’ve failed to prepare for your own exit.

(then I went into some info from previous blog posts on delegating)