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Startup founders and executives often struggle to delegate. As a result, they get overwhelmed and burn out.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Jessica Lessin<\/span>, CEO of The Information, recently wrote:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “A few weeks ago, I was reporting on two possible M&A deals and asked my sources why each company was looking at a sale versus an initial public offering down the road. In both cases, the answer was the same: The founders were done. There’s not a founder or CEO I talk to these days that doesn’t have some version of that story. They are exhausted.”\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Samuel Ajiboyede<\/span>, the author of the book The Entrepreneur’s Diary, said, “One reason a lot of startup founders and entrepreneurs get burnt out is the tendency to take on too many responsibilities.” His message is, “Don’t be afraid to delegate.” <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you are like a lot of startup leaders, several beliefs keep you from delegating:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These beliefs are reasonable when you are small. But if you do not delegate, your business cannot grow beyond the time you can spend on it. You also run the risk of exhausting yourself.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If you want to delegate, you have to decide what you should hand off to others. A valuable tool for choosing what tasks to offload is the Eisenhower Matrix, based on former general and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s statement, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. Urgent problems are seldom important, and important problems are seldom urgent.” <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Steven Covey turned this comment into a matrix with four quadrants to organise your tasks and who should do them.<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: 6 leadership lessons I learned after we raised our seed round<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n What tasks are urgent but not important? It is a little misleading because calling anything unimportant can be confusing. For example, an Asana report<\/a> found that managers spend 58 per cent of their time on administrative tasks like:<\/p>\n Calling these tasks unimportant is misleading. They are important but do they need to be done by you? Probably not. Consider this:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You can easily hand off these tasks to others. Other candidates include:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Does it save money to do this work yourself? Think about it this way, you are paying yourself to do tasks that you can outsource to others at a lower cost. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Going back to the matrix, to decide what you should not delegate, list the tasks that only you can do. These tasks require your judgment, experience, and leadership, and the buck stops with you. Examples include:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These are executive functions core to your business that only the top executive in a company can do. Depending on the size and status of your business, you might also be responsible for:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n One reason executives don’t delegate is that they don’t want to give others more work to do. That makes sense when you look at the nature of the tasks you should offload. They are administrative tasks, and you may not have a team member at the appropriate level with the right skills to do that kind of work.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Also Read: The 5-part agile leadership guide that will make you a better business leader<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n You could hire some to do your administrative work, but it is probably not a full-time job, and administrative assistants are hard to find. The <\/span>Lensa Index<\/span><\/a> found that administrative assistants are the third most challenging position to fill. Also, the time and expense of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training become one more distraction.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Startup executives and owners are turning to <\/span>virtual or remote executive assistants<\/span><\/a> as a cost-effective way to delegate time-consuming administrative tasks. The virtual assistant market grew by <\/span>40 <\/span>per cent in 2020 as remote work became the norm and executives realised offsite personnel can be productive and effective. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The virtual assistants usually work in areas of the world where college-educated, English-speaking talent is plentiful but opportunities for meaningful work are scarce. And most virtual assistants are already trained and have experience supporting executives, and have developed best practices for the tasks you want to offload:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There are a few ways to find virtual assistants, all with pros and cons.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Hire a freelancer through a job board:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Hire an independent contractor through a virtual assistant agency:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Use a managed virtual assistant service provider:\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sam Corcos<\/span><\/a> is a four-time founder and CEO. Corcos says, “Delegation is a superpower. It also takes practice.”<\/span><\/p>\n If you have internal resources to take on administrative tasks, great! This guide should help you get started. If not, there are people from around the world eager to help.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Enjoyed this read? Don\u2019t miss out on the next insight.\u00a0Join our WhatsApp channel for real-time drops<\/a>.<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0e27<\/b>\u00a0aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by\u00a0submitting<\/a> an article, video, podcast, or infographic.<\/p>\n Image credit: Canva Pro<\/p>\n This article was first published on May 23, 2022.<\/p>\n The post How startup leaders can delegate to prevent burnout\u00a0\u00a0<\/a> appeared first on e27<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Startup founders and executives often struggle to delegate. As a result, they get overwhelmed and burn out.\u00a0\u00a0 Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information, recently wrote:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “A few weeks ago, I was reporting on two possible M&A deals and asked my sources why each company was looking at a sale versus an initial public offering down Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.highschoolhypnotist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
What you should delegate <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h1>\n
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What you should not delegate <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Who you should delegate to \u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n
Consider virtual assistants <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Develop your superpower <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n