Delegate and Elevate

We’re big fans of the EOS (“Entrepreneurial Operating System”) model of business at GreenMellen, and it’s served us well over the years. We don’t follow it precisely, but some aspects of it (like meeting cadences and clarity breaks) have been astoundingly helpful for us.

EOS founder Gino Wickman has a variety of books on leadership, and his book “How to Be a Great Boss” had a concept in it that I found to be very interesting: Delegate and Elevate.

The idea is pretty simple. First, write down every single business-related activity that you do throughout the course of a day. Take a week or two and make sure you have everything included.

Then, take a piece of paper and split it into four quadrants:

• “Love/Great” activities are those that you’ve mastered and that you love doing — they give you energy and a sense of fulfillment.
• “Like/Good” activities are those that you can do with minimal effort and that give you enjoyment and satisfaction.
• “Don’t Like/Good” activities are those that you are good at doing — you have learned to do them well through repetition and necessity, but they don’t give you real satisfaction or a sense of fulfillment.
• “Don’t Like/Not Good” activities are most likely outside your area of expertise that leave you feeling inadequate and frustrated.

It should look something like this:

Next, take every item from your list and put it into one of the boxes. Over time, and this can take years, you should work to remove yourself from items in the bottom boxes and delegate those out, so that you can focus more time on the things that matter and elevate your work in those boxes.

I only recently discovered this exercise, but Ali and I have somewhat been doing this over the years. Things that we’re not good at (or we really don’t like) we’ve slowly removed ourselves from by building a small team. Taking the time to think through it and do it properly will only help solidify what your future plans might look like.

I encourage you to check out Gino’s book, but they also have a free PDF download with some worksheets in it, including more details about how they recommend you tackle this exercise.