If you’re like me, you came up by doing everything yourself. When SEO was a younger game back in 2006, that was easy enough to do. But those mercenary services slowly grew into a big marketing company, and then a few more companies. As we grew, I had to constantly turn over tasks I created that and understood completely to people who didn’t have the experience or drive to do them like I did.
This caused me a lot of stress. I fought it for a very long time, holding onto things to make sure they got done just right, and losing out on growth opportunities and sleep. I knew I was never going to take things to the next level if I couldn’t fix this. It’s been a long road, but these are the strategies that have helped me escape the things that shouldn’t have been holding onto my attention.
Understand That There Is No Moving Forward Without Figuring This Out
You have to face your fears, and losing control happens to be one of mine. There’s plenty of tactics for overcoming the things you fear, and I went with what they call “exposure therapy”. That’s where you do the thing you dread over and over until it just doesn’t faze you anymore. On TV, that usually involves something like letting spiders crawl on your hand, but I just had to…delegate.
I chose to toss the task out there, and simply not ask about it until it was due. File it away as filed in my mind so I could laser-focus on my high priorities. This took some training sure, but what made it easier was realizing how often my people were just ready to handle what I threw at them. Along the way, I discovered that there were some advantages I wouldn’t have predicted.
Learn the Limits of Your Team and the Best Way to Delegate to Them
I used to fail so hard at this. I assume because I can figure something out that any team member should too. And even if they can, I also assume they will be able to absorb the same piece of material I am looking at, or learned some technique/strategy from, and pick it up as easily as me. Wrong. If you’re going to delegate something, you better be damn sure you are available to QA. It doesn’t mean you need to be an expert, but it’s a huge benefit, maybe even requirement that you have a strong handle before handing it off.
Many times I find myself moving super quick and just hand something off to someone. Social is a perfect example. In my mind, social is easy. ‘Be human, communicate, engage, and measure’. It’s not rocket science, right? And yet I recall not long ago hiring someone for this duty and it was a total flop. We both assumed they could pick it up, learn it and run with it no problem. So there was no need for training, processes, etc. Wrong. I let her go not long after and we were both frustrated.
Slow down, create processes and when in doubt, break things up into little chunks. You or someone on your team master one piece. One social account. One task. And proceed from there.
It’s a hell of a lot easier to build a process as you go, vs. trying to remember the steps later. Take it slow and document your steps. Yes, I know as you get better or things change the steps will change and you will have to adjust the document. But that’s the whole point…imagine how good documentation can be if you can explain some of the hurdles you ran into along the way…you will end up answering every question someone else might likely have.
And as a manager, knowing that my processes are constantly updated keeps me secure, especially in the event that I inevitably lose someone and have to replace them with fresh blood.
Focus on the Advantages of a New Perspective
One of the reasons I don’t fear delegation anymore is that time and time again, I’ve underestimated how much a process could be improved upon by a new set of eyes. My employees inherited a lot of the processes I created for myself, but the changes they made when they applied their own expertise and gave it the attention I couldn’t have continued to impress me.
There are a lot of processes here that are simply better off because I chose to delegate them. This is why I am now usually eager to put it in someone else’s hands. I don’t have the answers. I can guide someone a little. I can show them how I would do it. But the person who’s going to ultimately do the task is going to get to know it so much better than I would have time to.
I can’t do everything, so I rely heavily on someone jumping in where I left off and owning that task and then communicating up the chain of command what they’ve learned, what roadblocks they’ve hit and how things can be done better. Better, when they do all of this, document it, and I don’t even hear about it. It just happens.
A good example of this is keyword research, which is essentially identifying the search volume, competition and value of a particular term searched in Google. There are a million ways to do this, all better than my own way I am sure. I depend on Alex, our Search Director to curate all the best ways, boil them down into a process and teach our team how to execute. There are so many things like this in SEO…I have to lean on my team if I intend to keep our team on the cutting edge.
