Beyond Busy-ness: A Paradigm Shift For More Effective Delegation

Nikki McKnight: Hey, I’m Nikki. I’m an operations and a system strategist, and in my business, I do a lot of things. I am writing, I’m designing, I’m building software, I’m consulting, I record a podcast. I’m also thinking about a lot of things. How am I going to bring in sales? What should I tell a client? What am I going to put in this proposal, and should I launch this new program? I worry about a lot of things. I worry about not having enough time, money, energy, or space to do what I want to do and what I need to do.

Business owners, no matter how long you’ve been in business or what your level of growth and/or scale is, exist within this operational ecosystem of multiple balls, constantly bouncing around alongside multiple types of problems and so many different ways of thinking. This environment can be really overwhelming. It can be exhausting. It can feel challenging to feel like we’re moving the business forward and not just getting stuck in busyness, in crossing things off a to-do list.

We want to feel like we are making progress, and we don’t want to worry that we are letting things fall through the cracks. Being neurodivergent adds in this extra layer of consideration and difficulty. Me, I’m the ADHD brand of neurodivergent so when it comes to moving all of these moving pieces and building a sustainable and successful business ecosystem, there’s more for us to work through. If we have reached the point in our business where we feel like we want to have support, we should know that most, if not all, problems can be solved with one of three different kinds of support.

The first type of support you can have is people, as in a literal body or bodies who can do things and take ownership of things. These folks can bring skills to the table that you maybe don’t have. They can take things off your plate. They can replace you in certain parts of the business. When you use people as a solution, you have to start thinking interpersonally. What mix of roles or skills do I need, and how are they all going to work together?

Your next option for support can come from a process. Essentially, if we make something more efficient or if we optimize it, it becomes easier and smoother, requiring less time to execute it, or it’s going to produce a better result. When we start thinking about process, we need to start thinking optimally. What is the best way for this to be done and to get the result I want, and how can we make our actions more powerful and effective?

Lastly, support can come in the shape of a platform. If we are introducing new software or a new framework to better support the communication or movement of information within the business, it can require less oversight or decision-making is faster and easier. Now, in this case, we have to think intersectionally. How do all these things fit together in this environment of minimum effective dose with the fewest amount of redundancies and just make sure everything happens as it needs to be?

These are a lot of things to consider. There are a lot of things to juggle. Most folks, when they reach a point of wanting to bring in support, will default to people as the solution, to hire someone or someones to come in and do the things so that they can do more of what they want and what they need. For today, I’m just going to focus on people as a solution or how you can leverage delegation or outsourcing to lessen your mental and physical load while the business ecosystem keeps operating.

If people require us to think interpersonally about how roles are going to fit together, what are some typical challenges we can encounter when it comes to delegation or using people as a solution? First one is what? What do I need? Maybe I have a feeling that I have or maybe a feeling that I want to get rid of, but I might not know how that translates into a human being or a role. Who? Who do I need? I may have a job title in mind, and for most folks in the early stages, they think VA, OBM, or another role where the titles are made up and the points don’t matter, but you might not know if it’s the right one or even what that role means or what you can expect from them.

How? How do I find the right person? Even if I know the title I need and what I want, how do I find that person? Perhaps in the past you’ve hired and soon discovered it wasn’t the right fit. How can you get confidence that you’ll make a better decision this time? Finally, when? When can I expect to feel relief? Often when you’ve hired someone and you feel a sense of, “Oh my God, finally I can stop worrying about this,” it soon becomes obvious that instead of relief, you’re dedicating even more time to things you wanted to delegate, always worrying if things are getting done or getting done right.

How we perform the act of hiring is pretty basic. There’s many folks out there with templates and checklists to help you figure out what you need and how you post about it and how you interview, et cetera. Before we even get there, before the job posting even gets written, we need to adjust our framework for how we think about hiring, how we think about communicating and how we think about the goal of our hiring process. We need a different paradigm through which we delegate in our business.

The shift I want to offer you today as you think about bringing in people to support you is to consider the difference between execution-based delegation and decision-based delegation. Execution-based delegation is probably the most common. I’m going to hire someone to complete a task. I’m going to have someone do what I do so I can stop doing it. I was doing XYZ, now someone else is going to do XYZ. It is this one-to-one exchange.

Decision-based delegation, on the other hand, is to essentially create a copy of myself, my brain, so that a new person would know and understand what I value, how I think, and what I want. They can approach any problem, any solution, anything in the business that I’ve hired them to do and ask themselves, “What would Nikki do?” and I would be happy with whatever decision they make. In this situation, it’s no longer this one-to-one exchange of I did it, now you do it. It’s exponential handover because now not only am I not involved in performing a task, I’m also giving over the myriad of decisions that have to be made or that will be made above, below, and around that task.

Why is this important, especially for neurodivergent folks? One is about managing cognitive load. When we can delegate both decisions and execution of those decisions, of those tasks, we get to reduce our cognitive burden. We get to focus on either the higher level strategic thinking or the areas in which we excel rather than every single open loop that is out there. The second thing is time management. Conditions, for example, such as ADHD, typically make time management challenging. There’s difficulties in meeting deadlines, managing schedules effectively so that if we stop, the business stops, and that’s not sustainable.

The third reason this is important in terms of a paradigm shift in thinking, is this going to help us reduce our decision fatigue? Our ability to make sound decisions after being faced with many choices throughout the day is going to go down, which can affect the business’s reputation or its output. Finally, I feel this probably the most, consistency and quality of work. Inconsistent attention to detail and fluctuating energy levels can impact the quality and the consistency of work, which is going to ultimately affect client satisfaction and if you have a team, team morale.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into this execution-based delegation, or sometimes what I refer to as the dowy, the doing the thing, versus a decision-based delegation, or what I can call the thinky, and how it works in practice. Delegation has different levels of how an individual or a business unit contributes to the overall business ecosystem. An individual is a person doing the thing. A business unit is something more like sales, marketing, delivery, ops, financial. We are going to walk through this using what I like to call the contribution pyramid.

The first two levels of this pyramid are concerned with execution, the actual doing of the things. It begins with tasks. What does a person or business unit have to do? What needs to be completed? Day to day, day in, day out, what are we doing? Above tasks, we move into level two, which is process. How are tasks connecting together to execute or implement? The top two levels of the pyramid are all about decisions and the impact that those decisions have on the business. The third level is about outcome. What is the result of these processes being successfully completed? What is being created or what can be true? Finally, at the top of the pyramid, we have value. The impact that these outcomes have on the livelihood, the profitability, and the reputation of my business. How will I know we are successful? What will I see when things are working? This is now a value question. When we hire based on execution-based delegation or someone who is just doing your current actions, you’re operating at this first level of the pyramid. When you hire someone for this type of work, the meetings and conversations with this person often revolve around, what are you doing? Is this done? Can you go do this? What about this? This wasn’t done correctly. Can you go do this?

Then hopefully over time, once you have some more things that are not on your plate, you have this person operating at a task level, that person will either grow into or you start hiring for levels two, three, and four of this pyramid. More often than not, especially for us neurodivergent folks, the decisions are actually the things that take the most time and energy and the things that also have the largest impact on the health of the business. Thinky can be harder than the dowy, at least in my world.

It doesn’t really matter if you have really great SOPs. I know a lot of folks out there say that you need to have all of these in place before you hire and they’re soon effective. To me, that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t impact as much as the types of delegation you’re doing because even with SOPs, you’re still talking about a task level, maybe a process level way of delegation. That still leaves you all of these other things up here to manage, oversee, and decide on. This is why when you bring in help and it’s actually added to your plate, not taking things off of it, because you still have to do the mental heavy lifting and guide the person doing the actual execution. It can be a lot.

There hasn’t really been a lot of stuff that you’ve removed yourself from. On the flip side, we do have decision-based delegation. In this world, this is the world that I live in, I hire based on level four and I leave levels three, two, and one up to them. When you can create an environment when someone understands your brain, what is valuable to you, the business, the goals, the strategies, then they get to take their own experience, their own skills, their perspective to decide the rest of it.

Now the conversation has shifted with this person because instead of me talking to them and asking, “What are you doing? Is this done? Can you go do this?” It’s how are customers feeling? How are we tracking against our goals? What do you suggest happens next? How will we know if the business is successful? In this model of decision-based delegation, I’m not managing them at a task level. I am managing them at a value and outcome level because how they do it is irrelevant to me. That’s where their genius comes in. That sounds hard. [laughs] It can be.

It can take longer to hire in this way. It can require more effort. It definitely requires a lot more thought on your part. It requires trust in this person that you’ve hired and everybody working collectively to build that trust. It can mean paying people more. In the long run, this style of hiring and delegation can be much more effective and give you the relief that you seek from day one instead of waiting to hire multiple people down the road at some future point.

What does this look like in practice? Let’s use my business as an example. I am a fractional COO. I am a consultant. I sell digital products and I train operations professionals. When I look at a business structure from an operational standpoint, I’m dividing it into three different parts. You’ve got your sales and marketing, AKA how am I attracting and closing clients? I have product ops slash delivery. How do I deliver the thing I am being paid for? Finally, I have financial and admin. That’s just everything else that needs to happen to keep the business running.

Now, I hate sales and marketing. It’s not my skill set in terms of execution or strategy. I’m always second guessing myself on how to move forward. This is a part of my business that I often hire for support. Let us take sales and marketing in my business as an example. If I determined that sales and marketing is where I want to have support, and there are various tools and audits that help me figure out which one I’m going to hire next for, but if I’ve decided it’s sales and marketing, then my next step is to figure out what my contribution pyramid looks like for this part of the company.

What do I need to see or understand or have within my sales and marketing for it to be successful as a unit? Let’s start up at the top, value. I will know that my sales and marketing are successful when my client roster is as full as I would like for it to be. Just as a total sidebar, I use this language because I personally don’t like to set client goals in terms of numbers. I have 10 clients, I have 20 clients. As I grow and scale, those numbers become less irrelevant. If something is new, then I don’t really know how it will perform.

Maybe how full I want my programs to be in February is completely different from how I want it to be in August. Again, I like to use this little thing of they’re as full as I want them to be, I have control. I can turn them up and turn them down at will and not worry about it. That’s why this is an ultimate value to me. The next level down is outcome. The outcomes that are going to help me achieve that goal are, I’ve got clear and concise messaging and that is everywhere.

I am doing consistent outreach and getting in front of new audiences and people always know how to refer me, what I do, who I’m good for, who I’m not. If I understand those, then I will achieve that top of the pyramid. A level below that is the process. The processes that are going to get me there are my sales intake process, how I manage my CRM, my content marketing, so social, email, et cetera. Then finally, the tasks that have to happen to create all of those things. It’s almost like a reverse waterfall. Everything is going up.

Things like posting on social media, asking for referrals, following up with connections, creating proposals. Could even be things like reaching out to podcasts and filling out applications. If I looked at this part of the business and if I focused only on finding someone to do the tasks I am doing now, that execution-based delegation, then I would be looking at this line. I’m looking for someone to post on social, follow up with people, and send proposals.

Sure, that might get me a few hours in a month back, but ultimately, I am still the sole person responsible for deciding what I’m selling, what needs to go on social, and what needs to go on email, how am I going to pitch my proposals, what podcasts or audiences I want to be in front of, and I have to give both instruction and feedback to this person on the social posts, the list of referrals, and the proposals that that person is doing. Am I really any better off than I was in the first place?

Instead, if I went into this hiring process with a focus not on someone taking execution off my plate, this first level, but my decisions, these two layers up top, instead, I would say to them, my goal is to have my roster as full as I would want across offers A, B, and C. This is what’s important to me, this is who I like to attract, and this is what I think is important for people to know. Now, where do you think we should be putting time, money, and energy? What do you think would sell best? What do you need from me to get us there? What will we measure to know that things are working, or if we need to course-correct?

In this second scenario of hiring for this decision-based delegation, I have not only freed up my time of doing things, but my brain about thinking about things, and to me, that is endlessly more important. I’m going to walk you through one more example. Client delivery, or product ops, delivering the thing that people pay me for. If I hire for execution-based delegating, then I am hiring someone to answer emails, to post replays, to answer questions in Slack.

Then maybe over time, I bring in someone more senior, or this person advances, or they market themselves as a slightly higher OBM-type role, and now they are responsible for client onboarding and offboarding and making sure it’s done consistently and well, and maybe they tweak it a little bit based on feedback. Then after that, I might bring in someone to have ownership of the quality of the customer journey, how we’re going to optimize it, or how we’re going to up-level it. Then finally, if all these things below are working, we are going to meet our business goal of client satisfaction, retention, and referrals.

In this model, I always retain the responsibility of decision-making at a higher level until I hire someone to manage the level below me. I have to direct everything lower than me on the pyramid. I decide what the metrics are. I decide when and how to change the journey. I review and edit the onboarding checklist and emails. Someone else just executes the day-to-day and follows my instruction. It’s a lot. If I can go into this process with a focus on decision-based delegation, then I explain to someone how important client satisfaction, retention, and referrals are to me and to the business and some metrics or targets I might have. I leave the rest up to them.

They decide when the customer journey needs to change. They determine the best way to onboard and offboard. They will ensure that whatever the day-to-day tasks are to support these things get done. Maybe they decide, “You know what, Nikki, we don’t need to be answering emails. We’re going to do something new where clients submit questions or go here for information, completely gets rid of email, and we’re going to do it this way instead because it’s more efficient.”

Fantastic, I’m never going to come up with that in this process. I’m too busy with other things. I set the standard for what I want created. They go decide what to do and how to do it. Again, the conversation shifts. We’re no longer talking about tasks. Did you do it? Did you answer those emails? Did you check the inbox? What did you do? What’s next? The conversation is based on value. Are we creating the environment for what we need and want? What results do you think are important?

This feels like relief to me that I don’t have to be doing all of the thinking, that I don’t have to be responsible for everything in the business, that if I make a wrong choice, I’m the only one involved. If I take a vacation and there’s no one around to make decisions, what happens? I’ve been there, done that, don’t necessarily want to go back. I was by a pool at the resort in Kauai, Hawaii. I was like, “No, I’m going to leave my phone in my room. I can make it. It’s fine, nothing’s happening.”

Y’all, I made it 10 minutes before I had to go running back to my room to get my cell phone because I was worried something was going to come up while I was away. I was still very much operating from this world of I delegate tasks instead of decisions. Now, when we start to think about how this shift looks like in practice, and we go through this exercise of thinking about the business units within our business and what does each level of the pyramid look like, this is what comes with us into the actual hiring process.

As I said before, how you hire, how you write a job description, how you write a job ad, how you interview, onboard, et cetera. So many templates out there exist. I have templates for it. We have to do all of this thinking beforehand to really understand how to make this process effective. How do I take this into the hiring process? Essentially, the work that we’ve done on these pyramids and understanding things like value, outcome, process, and tasks, these answers, this work that I’ve done is going to come into the hiring process in the form of the job ad, the job advertisement, the interview questions I ask, and how I onboard folks into the business.

In the job ad, because I know what language to include to communicate the value and the outcomes I’m really looking for, that is going to attract that type of person that thrives and feels energized by that type of work and hopefully loves it. In a job ad, I am able to say I am looking for someone who thrives on designing a customer experience so good the customers never want to leave and they tell all their friends about it, instead of I would like someone who can answer client emails and check the inbox daily.

What type of talent do those attract? In the interview questions, I take that language from the pyramids and I can center my conversations around those decision levels of the pyramid, not the execution ones. It is easier to find people who can do those bottom two levels of pyramid, who can just execute on tasks and that’s great. What I really want to be able to tell in an interview is do they currently or do I think they could have the capacity to make decisions from day one or if they’re just going to wait for me to tell them what to do.

How to complete a task can be taught but how to make truly aligned decisions takes a special type of person and I want to know as early on in the process if they can become that person. Then within the onboarding process, I want to be able to set clear expectations from the beginning about what they’re responsible for and our conversations turn immediately into how can I deliver value and high impact work from the beginning. I will pat myself on the back and say one of the things I think I am really great at is usually within about an hour of working with a brand new client.

I can look around and say, “Okay, here’s what I’m seeing, here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s what I think I’m going to be doing over the next 60 days. It is going to help you do X, Y, Z. What do you think?” Awesome, great, I’m just going to go and do that. Being able to do that for someone I think is so powerful as a service provider but as a leader to have someone do that to me, oh my gosh, y’all, it feels really nice. It feels good. In my experience, the highest impact area that we can manipulate after we’ve gone through all this thinking is the interview process and the questions you ask.

Maybe in the past, if you have been doing some hiring with contractors or part-time or full-time employees, you may have interviewed folks who gave great answers in the interview but ultimately didn’t perform in the way you expected them to. You may have found it really challenging to communicate your needs to these potential support folks. You may have experienced frustration with new hires because they weren’t quite displaying the initiative and problem-solving abilities that you were really looking for. Again, you may feel like hiring has actually added more work to your plate instead of taking it away.

With all of this, it is extremely likely that you’re asking the wrong type of questions. Much like the pyramid and this idea of execution-based delegation versus decision-based, in an interview, instead of asking someone, “What do you do? Can you handle this task? Do this software?” you start asking questions that dig into how they think, how they problem-solve, and how they approach success. I have put together this resource for you called 28 Questions to Ask Your Next Hire. This is not just a list of questions that you could get from ChatGPT.

This is a strategic tool that’s been designed to help you uncover the true value and outcomes that a candidate can bring to your business. Inside, there are 28 questions that have been written to help you really focus on those top two levels of the pyramid in an interview scenario. I’ve included questions that are just general cultural fit questions, but also questions specific for an admin or executive assistant-type role, a tech or funnel person, a social media manager, an operations person, a client services or customer service, and paid ads.

If any of those you’re looking to hire or you just want ideas on questions, that is available for you at theopsshop.biz/28-questions, or you can just use that QR code to grab that resource. When you do sign up for that, there is a really short three-email sequence, and you can opt out of that sequence at any time. Totally up to you. I wanted to put that together for you so that you can take the pyramid structure, the contribution pyramid that we’ve been going through today and then see how that matches up in practice with questions I ask during interviews.

In summation, we have reached the end. To harness the power of delegation that truly frees you up, especially those of us who are neurodivergent and who want to manage the complexities and cognitive load of running a business, you must shift from execution level to decision-based delegation. That’s the shift. There’s three things I want to leave you with in terms of your own action items for you to reflect on today, this week, or whenever you’re watching this replay.

The first is I invite you to reflect on your current delegation style. look at how you’re currently delegating and communicating with team members or maybe how you’ve done it in the past, and consider shifting from execution-based to decision-based delegation. Think about how can I empower team members to make decisions aligned with values and goals rather than just completing tasks. Second thing, redefine job roles on your hiring processes.

Now, this is not something you can do in one day. This is a process. When you’re creating job ads, when you’re interviewing candidates, when you’re onboarding new hires, the focus should be on their ability to make decisions that align with the business’s values and outcomes. Create job descriptions, create interview questions that highlight the decision-making responsibilities and assess a candidate’s ability to think strategically, not just on can they do a thing. Finally, build trust and communication frameworks. It can be a very vulnerable thing to hire support and bring someone into your business, let them see the mess behind the curtain and say, “Help me, please.” Think about how you can develop- –a communication strategy that centers around discussing values and discussing outcomes rather than just tasks. When you’re checking in with your team, your support people, engage with them at the higher level impact of their work, such as customer satisfaction and business growth, instead of just, “What are things you got done this week?” When you do that, that is when your brain, your time, and your calendar will open up exponentially.

I’m Nikki McKnight. Thank you so much. If you’d like to follow me on Instagram, I am at I-A-M-N-I-K-K-I-M-C-K. Happy to answer anything in the DMs or just check me out. I also like to include this. I have a romance podcast with a friend of mine. We’re both entrepreneurs and we refuse to have a business podcast because one of the things that the style of delegation has allowed me to do is have passion projects and to have hobbies. I am a millennial who wants to have hobbies again.

I have Lego. There’s Lego on the wall behind me. I want more hobbies. Because of this work and the thinking that I’ve done, I’m able to have a passion project podcast that’s all about romance novels. Check us out, First Dates and Soulmates on Apple, Spotify, et cetera. Finally, if you would like a link to that resource I mentioned, there is the QR code as well as the link for you to get my list of 28 questions to ask your next hire. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. I appreciate your time. I’ll catch you online.