You can’t delegate the passion

December 16, 2009 | (No Comments)

One of the challenges as you grow a company that you’re passionate about is delegating.

A lot of fellow entrepreneurs end up never developing, or wanting to develop, the skills that enable one to grow from being a manager of yourself, to a manager of others, and then a manager of managers. This is sometimes called “not making it to the next level”, but that’s a foolish way of looking at it.

It’s as foolish as saying a baseball player that specializes in one position and doesn’t change positions is “not making it to the next level.” While moving was great for Babe Ruth’s career, for the vast majority of ball players it makes more sense to focus on the one position that best exploits and exhibits their talents.

So it’s fantastic that there are committed, crazy entrepreneurs out there who enjoy the process of making new companies so much that they want to spend their lives in the hectic hothouse of innovation, and they let go of a company once the bureaucracy and the legal and the administrative work get to be too high a percentage of their job. That’s smart, really.

As for me, I happened to find a field in which I want to work for decades. And there are some entrepreneurs who find that the business they have started suits them so well that they want to grow with it for years. Gates, Dell and Hastings love software, computers and movies a whole lot, and they have learned to scale with their companies.

And scaling means that as you get bigger, there are more and more organizational, design, procedure, copy, and customer decisions to be made. If you make yourself an essential, mandatory chokehold on all of those decisions, before long you will become the bottleneck where decisions go to die a slow, painful, agonizing death somewhere between your Inbox and your already-too-long meeting agendas.
So you have to learn how to delegate: outlining the outcomes, goals, and ground rules, and then monitoring, motivating, and measuring people on their way there. That’s the type of delegation it takes to get to larger and larger stages of your company’s growth.

But there’s one thing you shouldn’t ever delegate.

The passion.

Because you can’t delegate the passion.

Why?

Because you shouldn’t and you mustn’t:
When you find yourself passionate about the business a big part of your personal motivation is staying close to that subject matter that gets you so very excited. Whether its movies or software or jobs, the flywheel on your engine gets going round-and-round when you engage with all those bits and pieces that might be arcane to your customers, but fill you with the excitement of remember your first kiss. It’s like you are rediscovering your business every time, because you’ve learned something in the past few minutes, hours, days, and years that is going to give you a new perspective. And allowing yourself to be alive to that excitement is what makes you personally fulfilled and so damn effective as a revolutionary leader.

And that passion lets everybody around you know that there is something new to be fired up about every day. Because sometimes your people, when they get tied up in the organizational, design, procedure, copy and customer decisions – basically, all of the things that were getting in the way of you being able to be passionate – when they get tied up in those things, they can forget the reason they decided to join your business in the first place was how excited they were about everybody’s energy and zeal for the business. So you have to feel free to remind them. You can invite them along with their own passion; you can encourage them to remember to feel their passions; but you can never abdicate your own responsibility to keep the fire alive inside yourself and your company.

Yep, delegation is a really important of your success as an entrepreneur behind a growing business, but you must never, ever, let yourself forget that the passion is something you mustn’t give up.