Founders: Delegate, Don't Document

One of the biggest levers we can pull as founders is the leverage of our time.

The playbook is: build a team who excels at (and enjoys) things that you’re not great at or don’t enjoy so you can focus on the highest value activities in the business.

But when it comes to delegating, sometimes we put too much of the onus of creating systems and processes on our plate. This, in turn, keeps us from effectively offloading things in our business at all.

Too often, we say:

It’s just too much work, I’ll just do it myself.

Every founder, ever

To avoid procrastinating on delegating something, I’ve taken a very Show First type of approach. More on that in a minute.

Here’s the key. Everything in my business needs to have clear documentation around it (and yours should too).

We talk about The Bus scenario a lot. What if I get hit by a bus tomorrow…who’s gonna run payroll?

What if our lead developer leaves the company, do we have their institutional knowledge somewhere for others to reference?

Is our design system written down somewhere so our head of product can get someone else to help them design our next feature?

How do we handle refund requests? What are the parameters and decision making process there?

Systems and documentation put together become a Playbook.

When done right, a Playbook would enable literally anyone who is a subject matter expert to come in and be successful as a member of our team on Day 1.

This is the definition of DONE for writing Playbooks at Castos.

But I am rarely the one writing playbooks.

I include that as an expectation when I delegate something.

The Loom video I create is not part of the final documentation, but it is the thing that enables a team member to then create the documentation and resulting Playbook themselves.

So, when I’m delegating something to a team member, the process looks like this:

• I record myself walking through a project/task/action. Talking through it as I’m taking the steps, and recording myself and the screen at the same time. Get a Loom team account so you can easily make this visible to the whole team (not just one random person having the recording link!)
• I ping the person that will be responsible for this item and let them know 3 things: what item I’m delegating, what success looks like for this project, and how I would like to be involved going forward.

So, for example it could be:

Christina, here is the process for paying one of our team members in Wise. The login is in 1Password. Anytime that a new invoice comes in from this team member, please pay it immediately. If you could include the payment receipt in my FYI email folder just so I know it’s taken care of. Loom video attached.

The expectation is built in that when something is delegated to you, it’s on you to build the documentation, systems, and resulting Playbook for this in our team Notion area. These are visible to everyone, and it’s now this person’s responsibility to make sure that’s up to date and accurate. It’s just part of this being on their plate.

Then I tell myself something really important: Never Again.

Never again do I need to pay these invoices. If something comes up, it doesn’t go back on my plate, it’s not my responsibility anymore. If an issue arises, I ask the person who I delegated it to to look into the matter and propose 3 potential resolutions to me.

To me, delegating isn’t just something that happens in an ideal world. It should be persistent and durable.

Over To You

How do you handle the documentation and delegation of activities in your business? Drop me a line!