Leveraging your team is also of course important – in fact, essential – for your success. How do you get more value created in less time? Who are the people you need? What are the tools that you will be providing them with? What are the resources you have in your environment? You’re not trying to be superman or superwoman. You can’t be. You’re looking for human beings who will follow your system to make predictable and proactive choices for long-term success.

One of the most effective ways to leverage your team is to delegate. You delegate for only two reasons:

1. To save time. You must free yourself from the lower hourly rate tasks so you can be working to provide maximum value to the business.

2. To get better quality. Don’t get hung up on trying to be the best at everything – you can’t be, and even if you could that’s not the road to success because you only have so many hours in a day. Business is a team game.

You need to let go and give other people positions of power and responsibility. You want people who will say ‘I will do this’, and you can simply let them go, knowing they will come back to you with the task completed according to the plan and the schedule. You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room – in fact, your aim should be to bring in people who are smarter than you!

Who doesn’t want to increase the overall skills and abilities of their organisation? Leverage intelligence on the back of leveraging systems.

You do have to be careful though. There are a couple of traps of delegation that you should avoid:

• ‘Dumping’: This is when you keep putting things off until you are bursting at the seams, then you bring somebody in and you dump a mountain on them and ask them to ‘fix it’, rather than bring them up to speed in a manageable way. This is not a good use of delegation.

• ‘Stepping aside’: The biggest trap is you delegate and then think you can relax because somebody else is on the case.  Delegation only works when you then move on to higher hourly rate activities. Don’t step aside, step up.

It’s all about creating value. It’s about measurable outcomes. How can I get more time doing the things I’m exceptional at doing? Hold these things sacred more than anything else.