Delegating Earlier Without Losing Responsibility for the Work
Doing everything yourself has a cost even when it does not appear as a separate invoice. Brian and I discuss overwork and delegation in this Behind the Scenes clip. I also describe lessons I heard while filming a mastermind and how I tried to apply useful business ideas to my own work.
Find the task that needs a clearer owner
Delegation works better when the assignment is understandable. Identify what needs to be done, what a good result looks like and which decisions the person can make. Simply moving an unclear task to someone else does not resolve the confusion.
Look for a bounded part of the work you can hand over responsibly. It might be a repeatable preparation step or a defined portion of an edit. The choice should reflect the person's skill and the project, not a rule that every new business must hire immediately.
Explain the handoff and the review
Provide the relevant material, context and constraints. Decide where questions should go and how the result will be checked. A useful review looks at the agreed outcome rather than whether the person followed every habit you would have used yourself.
Responsibility for the project does not disappear with the handoff. Keep the client-facing commitments accurate and do not claim a team member has completed something before it has been verified.
Learn while you work, then apply selectively
In the clip, the mastermind was an opportunity for me to hear ideas from another industry. I describe it as an influential experience. That does not make every idea from that setting an automatic fit for a production company.
The practical lesson is to notice useful principles, test them in a small part of your work and assess the result. Delegation should make the work more sustainable and clearer, rather than create another process that depends on you fixing every detail afterward.
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