 Do you sometimes feel like you've got too much going on, or it's fine that some of your important goals are falling off the table? It might be time to start delegating some of your decisions to someone else. Welcome back, leaders, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. If you're anything like me, you've got a lot going on in your life. Right now, I'm running a business full-time, and I'm back in school full-time working on my MBA. But even if I didn't have those school commitments, I have way more goals to achieve for evil genius leadership than I have the mental bandwidth to be able to put in on any given day. When we run up against our bandwidth limitations, we often delay making an important decision or starting a new initiative. But ultimately, this holds us back from achieving our mission or our purpose. And if our purpose is truly important to us, delaying those decisions should be our last resort. A better alternative we have available to us is to delegate authority to someone on our team to make those decisions or handle those initiatives for us. If you're new to leading a team, the idea of delegating authority and letting other people make decisions for you can be a little bit scary. After all, our performance as leaders is judged based on the decisions we make and the performance of our team. But there are some ways we can get past these scary feelings by adopting some deliberate, conscious behaviors and actions to help us out. Our delegation is all about asking ourselves one very important question. What are the decisions I'm willing to let someone else make? And what are the decisions I feel like I need to hold back for myself? And there are a number of factors we need to consider as we ask ourselves this. The first one of those factors is what are the stakes? How important is this decision to the overall mission accomplishment or the overall health of the organization? If you're a small business owner, you may be comfortable letting one of your employees decide which pictures to post to your social media accounts or to put up on your web page. You may not be comfortable letting the same employee go to the bank and take out a $50,000 loan for your company. The next factor we need to consider is who on the team do we trust to delegate this decision to? And this is a complex question all by itself. Some of the things that I like to think about when deciding who to delegate to are who on the team has the skill and ability to gather all the factors to make the decision. Who on the team has the judgment to really think the decision through and represent my interest as the leader? And also, who on the team has the maturity and dedication to see this thing through all the way to the end? Before we delegate, it's really important to consider what the payoff is for doing so. And by this I mean we need to ask ourselves, if I delegate this task or decision to someone else, what are the more important things does it free me up to do? Delegating only easy, inconsequential tasks or decision to others doesn't really help us optimize that mental bandwidth we've been talking about and get us focused on the strategic things we need to be thinking about as leaders. It's really important that we try to hold on to only those decisions and tasks that we feel like we must do and try to build trust with our team so that we can start delegating the rest. Finally, I don't want you to think you have to have a big team of people or a lot of people working for you before you can start delegating. Even if you have a small team or no team at all, just asking someone to help you out can be a great way to start getting some of that mental bandwidth freed up for you. I hope you enjoyed these tips to get you to start delegating and freeing up some of your own mental bandwidth. Tell us in the comments what other things you consider before you delegate a task or decision to someone else. Come back later in the week. We're going to have a blog post that talks more about delegation from an empowerment and team member development standpoint and the best way to get ahold of that, click on that globe off to the right that says subscribe. That'll get you signed up for our email list and all our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it as always. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.