Do you find yourself saying any of the following?

• If you want it done right, you just have to do it yourself!
• It’s so hard to find good help these days!
• This project is just too important to delegate!
• By the time I teach someone, I could just do it myself!

If any of these statements sounds familiar, it’s time to dare to delegate. Chances are, you’re spending too much time at work focusing on things that drain you.

When you’re stuck, it can leave you feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. It happens when you, your department, or your company isn’t growing anymore. It also happens when you’re growing too fast and everyone is struggling to keep up.

This is a normal part of organizational growth—think of it as growing pains. In EOS, we call this Hitting the Ceiling.

Acknowledging when you’ve hit the ceiling is vital, because once you and your team have acknowledged it, it just becomes an issue that needs to be solved.

It appears as if Greg McKeown has written a book for business owners and leaders who run their business on EOS – the Entrepreneurial Operating System. One of the basic tenants of EOS is that less is more, that you have to go slow to go fast. Focus, focus, focus. Single point accountability. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less meshes perfectly with these concepts.

Chances are, you do many things well. As a business owner, this may have been imperative at times, especially in the early days when you had no choice but to do it all yourself.

Then at some point your business gained traction. The opportunities continued to grow, but so did the complexities of running the business.

Along the way, you may have become comfortable in certain roles such as being the ultimate decision maker, the go-to person for business processes, or just the person that seems to have all the right answers. Everyone wanted a piece of you!

Have you ever struggled with letting someone else do something that you can do faster, better, and with less effort? If you really think it through, you know that if you don’t pass the task on, you'll be doing it yourself forever.

If this task is in fact the best use of your time, then maybe the staff member isn’t needed. But if there's a better use of your time, then you have delegate it to someone else who will do it slower, not quite as good, and with more effort. You have to let go of the vine*.

How much of your week is spent doing these types of tasks?