Show Notes:

The top two delegation problems. “If your organization is going to grow, if you desire to impact more people, and if you desire to improve your life in some way, you have to learn to delegate. So why don’t we delegate? It’s not that most leaders aren’t sold on delegation. It’s just that they struggle to do it. I think this could be for two reasons. Number one, you do not have confidence in the people you’re trying to delegate things to — meaning that there’s a task you’d like to delegate, but you look around and your office and don’t believe anybody there has that capability to do it well, or you believe that by assigninhttps://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=CVP1946867581g it to them, they’re essentially going to return a poor work product that you’re going to have to fix. This is a capability problem. Number two is a capacity problem, meaning you look around the office and everyone on your team is already spread too thin and you don’t have that person where you can add something to their plate. The good news is that both of these problems are solvable with the right leadership.”

Expand your capacity. “When you evolve as a human being, you develop the capability to delegate. A lot of times you’re going to delegate things to people who are better at doing those things than you are and generally are probably better suited to doing those things. As you do this enough times and you expand over a long enough time horizon, you might find that you aren’t doing anything other than strategic work, like charting the vision for your firm and truly occupying the role of a CEO or a leader of your organization. If you’re holding onto everything and spending all of your time in the day-to-day of the business, then you can never expand. You can never work on the business or create a better future until you delegate and let some of those things go.”

Balance is earned. “Here’s a simple way to get work-life balance. If you own the business, you decide what time you come in, what time you leave, how many clients you take on, how many people you hire, and what investments you’re going to make. If you want to work 20 hours a week and that works for the lifestyle that you want and satisfies you, then go for it. The problem arises when you want it all and also want the balance — meaning that you want a law firm that’s going to be growing, making a huge impact on your community, and bringing in a lot of profit and you want to be able to have an awesome life where you don’t have to work more than 40 hours a week. It doesn’t work that way. I’d love to sell you some fake-ass course about a five-step model to solving this problem overnight, but I’d just be bullshitting you. If there’s anybody out there that tells you there’s a quick little step-by-step or multi-step process to achieving said result, they’re just trying to sell you something. The reality of it is that if you’re early on in the journey, there is no balance. If you’re seeking balance, then maybe this is not for you. Maybe you shouldn’t have started a business. Go work at a law firm and then you can work for somebody else’s vision. As a result, you’ll probably achieve greater balance because you don’t have to carry the same amount of risk and stress. However, you decided to bet on yourself and start your own business. Unless you’re willing to endure a significant period of imbalance, then you’ll never achieve real balance. Balance is a luxury now.”

The upside of stress. “Stress — especially amongst teams — is not such a bad thing. Too much stress can be debilitating and it can create paralysis, but stress is one of the greatest drivers of performance and results. If you weren’t stressed, like if you didn’t have a deadline, you’d never get anything done. What if you could live forever? The upside would be that you could be there for your kids, your grandkids, etc. — but the downside would be that you won’t really have a reason to get out of bed because you could always put things off until tomorrow or 100 years from now. Stress is one of the ultimate performance enhancers, period. It’s the driver of results. Stress is good. If you want to build a more resilient team that handles stress better, you should not be taking away stress. You don’t build a more resilient team by challenging them less. Put them in situations that test their resilience. This enables them to handle stress at high levels so they adapt and get stronger.”