| Going from sole principal to having a staff is a unique transition compared to
the typical “engineer to first level manager” so not all advice is going to work. Here is one approach. Not perfect, and there are obviously going to be cases where it doesn’t apply. All models are wrong, some are useful. A good metric for delegation in your case is “How much work am I doing that could plausibly be done by someone else?” Let’s call that value X, and the ideal value is zero. Ex: you are the only one who can make strategic decisions for your company. You are not the only one who can send a promotional email. Your process as a manager should be to systematically lower X over time. Reasons X is nonzero include but are not limited to: - New staff need training to learn how the org etc works. This should be temporary but unavoidable, and explains why you feel like they are making more work for you. - Staff need to upskill to take more off your plate. This means either you pay for training or train them yourself. Short term loss for long term gain. - You have not hired the right kind of staff for the workload you face. Maybe you hired an engineer, but on balance you should have hired an accountant since that actually takes up more of your time. - There is more work than can be handled by staff. This is an urgent problem that you need to resolve. If you burnout staff you end-up in a death spiral of turnover. The solution might be to replace inefficient processes/systems/practices, reduce work through trimming features/customers/whatever, or hire to handle growth. |