Like so many others there have been times on my leadership journey where I have struggled with sharing my responsibilities with the people on my team or church. If I am honest part of the reason I've struggled with this is because, I incorrectly felt like, if I gave this responsibility over to them, I would lose authority and control. However, I have been discovering that when we as leaders share what we have (responsibility / tasks) with those around us it does not take away from authority it actually gives us more.
In fact, allowing others to do the things that we have been given responsibility to oversee, not only gives us more authority it gives us what we crave the most...more time!
More time to develop other leaders.
More time to expand our vision.
More time to do the things that only we can do.
It can be so difficult at times to handover our responsibility as leaders, especially when we don't think they can do it as well as we can. However, I've learned (and sometimes the hardware) that "they won't do it as good as me" is just an excuse and a poor one at that. You and I will never be the leaders we could be and have the impacting organizations that we want to have unless we begin to develop and empower leaders more effectively.
In his book titled, "How successful people lead", John Maxwell says ...
"A good rule of thumb for transferring ownership of a leadership responsibility to someone else is the 80 percent rule. If someone on the team can do one of your task 80% as good as you can do or better, then give him or her the responsibility. If you want to be an effective leader, you have to move from perfectionist to pragmatist. "
Here are some questions:
If you had more time, what would you do with it?
Are you afraid of losing authority?
Are you too busy?
What are the people around you good at?
Can they do that task 80% as well as you?
What steps will you take this week to delegate that task to them?