You’ve found your passion. You’ve caught your vision and committed to a mission to achieve the vision. You have a perfect strategy and know the steps to execute.

Awesome!

Then you start to work and it hits.

You have to set up an office, with copiers and printers and phones and supplies and furniture. You have to establish the legal organization, get a board, set up the books, fill out the government paperwork. You have to start fundraising. You have to issue press releases. You set up a Facebook page, a web page with a blog, a Twitter account, and a Google+ group and then update them 3 times per day. You still haven’t begun to serve the clients.

The day you start to cry, you realize you need help. There is only so much time. There is only so much you can do. You cannot do it all. You must delegate or die. Your vision will die, and, in extreme cases, you might die yourself.

Delegation is one of the hardest skills you will ever put into practice. Not because it’s technically hard, but because it’s so emotional. The vision is mine. The strategy is mine. This is my baby. This is my passion. No one else truly has the vision and no one has my passion.

 Why Delegate?

Given that there are so many tasks and so little time, you must spend your time on the most valuable tasks. As you start out, you have to spend a surprising amount of time answering the 6 questions from my previous post. You should be spending time on spreading the vision and recruiting the first volunteers. And delegating everything else to those volunteers.

Excuses.

 “They won’t do it exactly the way I would do it, nor will they do it to my standards.”

That’s right and that’s good. As much as you might think, you really don’t know it all. Fresh eyes bring fresh ideas. You need to spend your time on high value tasks and let them focus on the details.

“It takes too long to train them.”

Yes, it takes longer to train them than it would take to do it yourself…the first time. But it takes less time to do it the first and second time, than for you to do it twice. Delegation gets more advantageous the more you do it. Delegation works best for tasks that are done more than once. Proper delegation is all about trust. I don’t mean, “Trust them to do it exactly the way I would do it.” Trust them to get it done.

P.S. Further reading: Patty Azarello has an interesting post on why and how to delegate. Check it out here.