What you love and excel at

20th March 2019

One of the first things we do in the delegation programme is track the actual amount of time we spend on all that we do in a working week, because most executives are so busy reacting to emergencies, they don’t really know.

One MD discovered he was spending 48% of his time on admin, which is certainly not what he gets paid to do. He thought he needed a better PA until he realised he was micromanaging and needed to delegate.

All we do, I propose, falls into four distinct categories:

  1. Things you are not very good at, but feel you must do;
  2. Things you are competent at, but don’t enjoy;
  3. Things you’re quite good at, but have no passion for;
  4. Things you excel at, and really want to do.

Number 4 is the realm of your Unique Ability, which I talked about in previous posts. The more time you spend in this zone, the more effective you’ll be, as long as the things you’re doing relate to your organisation’s objectives, of course.

Everything else is fair game for delegation.