This episode releases on the cusp of a new year. Of course, with a new year comes New Year’s resolutions, and there’s one resolution all accounting and finance professionals (and most people, really) can benefit from: becoming a better delegator.

So I sat down recently with Emily Morgan, the mastermind behind a group called Delegate Solutions, which offers premium-level virtual assistant services for entrepreneurs. They tackle your distracting to-dos, create a strategic delegation plan for meeting your goals, and fully manage the virtual team assigned to your projects.

In other words, they do the stuff you need to delegate in order to allow you to spend more time working in what Dan Sullivan calls our “Unique Ability.”

In this conversation, we cover the following:

• Are we actually busier or just more distracted?
• How to “Delegate and Elevate™.”
• Think you don’t have anyone to delegate to? Time to get creative.
• How Delegate Solution supports organizations of all different sizes and functions and how they’re helping the MACPA.

Listen to our conversation here. Are we too busy? We hear over and over that we’re all just too busy. We say we don’t have enough time to get important work done because we’re too busy doing other stuff — the mind-numbingly boring, time-consuming jobs that we hate, but that we’ve gotten pretty good at simply because we have spent so much time doing them.

And why do we keep doing that stuff? There are a million reasons, but Gino Wickman, the author of the best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, says it all amounts to what he calls “head trash.” These are excuses like, “I have no one to delegate to. It takes too much time for me to train someone. It’s faster and easier to do it myself. No one can do it as well as me. It’s too complicated to explain it to them. I spend too much time fixing their mistakes.” And on and on.

For the sake of our organizations and our own sanity, we need to figure out a way to spend more time working within our “Unique Ability.” Dan Sullivan defines as “the essence of what you love to do and do best. It’s your own set of natural talents and the passion that fuels you to contribute in the ways that most motivate you. By strengthening the areas where we have the possibility of achieving extraordinary results, it allows us the greatest opportunity for success. It also gives us the freedom to determine our most satisfying path in life.”

Who wouldn’t love to spend more time doing that stuff? But how do we figure out what that stuff is?

Gino Wickman and his team at EOS Worldwide have created a tool to help us do exactly that. It’s called Delegate and Elevate™, and in a nutshell, it works like this: Make a list of everything — and we mean everything — that you do at work. Anything you spend time on. Then place each individual task in one of four quadrants:

• Things you love to do and are great at.
• Things you like to do and are good at.
• Things you don’t like to do and are good at.
• And things you don’t like to do and are bad at.

The tasks in the first two quadrants make up your Unique Ability, and your goal is to delegate as much of the other stuff over time — either to colleagues or via outsourcing — and elevate the rest.

It’s a pretty simple concept, but really powerful in practice. If you want to learn more about it, pick up a copy of How To Be A Great Boss, a book Wickman co-wrote with Rene Boer.

If you still need any convincing that delegation is something we should all endeavor to do better at, consider these words from John C. Maxwell: “Successful people understand that time is the most precious commodity on earth. As a result, they know where their time goes. They continually analyze how they are using their time and ask themselves the question: ‘Am I getting the best use out of my time?’”

So let’s resolve to do way more of that in 2020. That’s where our organizations need us to be — and for the sake of our own sanity, that’s where we need to be, too. Luckily, we have Emily Morgan and her team at Delegate Solutions to help.

Resources:

• DelegateSolutions.com
• Download your free Delegate and Elevate™ worksheet.
• Read: Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman
• Read: How To Be A Great Boss, by Gino Wickman and Rene Boer
• Learn more at MACPA.org/future-learning-framework.