16. Why founders don’t delegate as much as they should
Most growing startups quickly reach a point where they are choked by the founder’s limited time. As humans, we simply don’t scale well. There is only so much that efficient work and forgone sleep can squeeze out of a day. The problem is that the entrepreneurs need to delegate more of their responsibilities.
This is not an intuitive process for most of us. The typical career path is all about accumulation responsibility and power. Rising through the ranks and building ever larger fiefdoms. As a founder, you go through the opposite process. Founders start off doing literally everything. They are CEO, accountant, customer support, and janitor. Between there and running a large successful company, they need to delegate almost all of that.
There are just a few things that only the CEO can do. Everything else can, and eventually should, be delegated. It is almost impossible to over delegate. I have never seen an entrepreneur who delegated so much that they were anything less than insanely busy.
Many entrepreneurs under-delegate because it hurts. You know your business better than the person you hired. You have been doing their job since the beginning. When they struggle, it is hard to resist jumping in to do it for them. In order for them to improve, you need to stand back and watch them screw up. They will make mistakes and take longer than you would. Letting them do so is the only path to learning and improvement.
However, at the end of that you get the joy of delegation. If you are hiring the right people, they will eventually be better at your job than you were. They can be more focused on their specific area than the entrepreneur ever could. Although I wrote all the early version of Anonymizer’s software, and had strong opinions about how it should be built, the developers I hired far surpassed me in short order. You are also able to stop working on jobs that you are bad at, or hate, or both. I delegated accounting in a big hurry.
The more things you hand off, the more time you have to focus on your core responsibilities as CEO. Eventually you want to be doing nothing but CEO level activities, having delegated literally everything else. Don’t worry, that is still too much work for most humans to handle.
This same principle applies to many of your early hires. The CTO you bring in early on may also be your only developer, but as the company grows they too will need to hand off responsibilities to focus on that CTO job. In a growing company, anyone with management potential will need to learn to delegate effectively if they want to grow with the business rather than being stuck in the trenches.
Delegating can feel awkward and wrong, but it is the only way your company can grow to significant size. The ability to delegate is a key difference between workers and leaders.
