Episode 406

The Five Rules of Delegating with Ben Pickard

In this episode, Ben and I are talking about delegating and we go through our five rules for effective delegating.

[00:00:00] Hello, my friend on today’s episode, we are covering a topic we’ve covered before on this podcast, because it’s that important. Ben and I are talking about delegating and we go through our five rules for effective delegating. So for all of you out there who know, you need to take some things off your plate.
You know you need the support of your team, but you’re just not sure how to ask for it and how to systemize that handoff on a regular basis. This is a great episode for you. So get your notepad out and get ready to become a better. Delegator.
Welcome to the business for unicorns podcast, where we help gym owners unleash the full potential of their business. I’m your host, Michael Keeler. Join me each week for actionable advice, expert insights, and the inside scoop on what it really takes to level up your gym. Get ready to unlock your potential and become a real unicorn in the fitness industry.
Let’s begin.[00:01:00]
Hello, fitness, business nerds. What’s up. Welcome to another episode of the business unicorns podcast today. I’m here with Mr. Ben Pickard. How are you, my friend? I’m doing great. How you doing? Good. It’s still kind of January. So it’s, I’m still feeling like I can just say happy new year every time I started conversations.
And I think this is maybe you and our, you and me are our first episode of the new year. So happy new year, Ben. Yeah. When is, thank you. You too. When is the cutoff? We’re saying happy new year is no longer acceptable. I think February 1st. I think you could do it for January and that’s it, but how were your holidays, my friend?
It was awesome. I was telling someone the other day we hit the perfect balance of doing things and intentionally not doing things. Nice. Like I worked out Christmas day with Katja and we like did productive quote unquote things, but we also lounged around and like Watched a movie at 2 PM on a weekday.
And I felt like the perfect amount of recharge coming back in because I’ve, I don’t know about you, but I have [00:02:00] memories as a kid of, I felt like my holiday break was just doing stuff. My parents asked me to do, and sometimes I just want to like sleep in or read or you get the idea. Yeah. You’re an adult.
You get to decide. You get to decide. Yeah. Good for you. Before we jump into today’s, today’s topic, I want to just remind folks that you all are invited to our next retreat in Toronto, Canada. Which is happening on March 21st and 22nd. We only have a handful of spots for people who are not Unicorn Society members, which is many of you listening.
And so I encourage you, if you want to come spend the weekend with me and Mark and Ben and Pete and the rest of the business Unicorns team, plus our whole Unicorn Society, Community. Come join us. We have, I think, usually around 10, 15 spots for non members. They go quickly. And again, it’s March 21st, 22nd in Toronto, and the topic is going to be marketing and sales.
So if you want to level up your marketing and sales in the new year, there’s no better two days you can spend with amazing, smart, funny, attractive people. I’m really talking us up, [00:03:00] aren’t I? Then this retreat in Toronto, I don’t have a confidence problem, clearly. Um, and so click the link in the bio, come join us, Ben, anything you want to say about retreats?
Yeah. I wanted to say actually a couple of things. Yeah. One day when I was a regular member, retreats were always the highlight for me. Yeah. Even if you were to hypothetically learn absolutely nothing at all, which like I challenge you to, we have a lot of great content. I always left feeling inspired and I can’t think of a better benefit to my business than coming back on fire to make change.
Yeah. Second thing is. This is the first time we’ve done anything in Canada. So like Canadian listeners, if there’s a few of you come to Canada, you don’t have to do us dollars. And for the US listeners, the Canadian dollar is terrible right now. This is going to be one of the most cost effective write offs for your business where you’re going to learn a bunch of stuff for effectively pretty cheap, come back inspired, like it is the perfect storm.
One hundred percent. Yeah, it’s going to be so fun. And Toronto is beautiful. It’s a beautiful city and we’re going to be there in March [00:04:00] when the weather is pretty temperate. And come join us. It’s always really inspiring. Two days. Yeah. And if you’re not sure it’s the right fit, DM us. Head over to Instagram, DM us.
Just DM us the word Toronto and we’ll let you know more details. We can have a conversation about whether or not it’s the right fit for you. But the spots go quickly, so don’t wait. If you’re hearing this, it means we still have spots available. So go click the link and do it quickly. That’s not just a sales tactic.
That’s true. We already have some that are pre sold before even recording this. And let’s dive in to today’s topic. So we’re at the start of a new year. And one of our most recent podcasts was Mark and I talking about, um, productivity and how to organize your tasks. And so I wanted to do something similar, but different.
And so today we’re talking about delegating, which is another kind of critical part to managing what’s on your plate as a worker, as a manager, as a leader. And we have a really. clear playbook for this. We’re not going to have time to go through the whole playbook that we have for our Unicorn Society members, but we’ll at least share the headlines of what we call like the five rules for effective delegating.
Before we get into the five [00:05:00] rules, Ben, you just want to talk a little bit about what’s your experience been with delegating and what makes this an important skill. My experience started as, I didn’t actually say this first part, but it is, I am the greatest at it. I have to do all the things because I am the best at them.
Nobody is going to be able to do them as effectively or accurately or as good as me. Now again, I don’t actually think I’m the greatest, nor do I think any of you listening think you’re God’s gift to humanity. But I had some trouble passing some stuff off to some coaches, to some ad, and maybe I’m like, I’ve had this client for a long time, I can’t pass them off, they’re going to quit, and what if they don’t do a good job, all of that.
I’m now on the other side of the coin where I happily let my GM run the show. Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I’m involved. Things are good, but I am delegating more things than I ever have. I’m encouraging the people I’m delegating things to, to delegate to other people. Like sometimes that’s just VAs and it just gets you so much closer to freedom and [00:06:00] quality doesn’t really.
Drop that much people make mistakes, but learning curve, that’s a learning period. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that’s good. My experience is like a complete one 80 for my own happiness and my business success and my wife’s happiness. And then what was the second part of your question? I forgot. That’s okay. I was just asking you like what experience you have with it.
What makes it important? Yeah. Waste important is if you, if your dream is to be a trainer who basically everything runs off of your elbow grease, like. Power to you do that, but don’t start a gym and hire people and then still have everything run off of you. If you truly want to build a gym that serves a greater community, which will make a bigger impact, bigger income and more freedom.
You don’t really have a choice, but to learn this. I guess the other choices keep having groundhog days. There’s plenty of people who hoard power and authority and responsibility and never give it away. But I don’t find those people tend to be very happy, very long. No, your team wants to [00:07:00] learn and grow.
Yeah. Your clients trust the people that you’ve hired because they trust you. I could go on and on, but like it, it’s a hard, it’s not a hard skill. It’s a skill that wasn’t inherent to me because I have a kinesiology degree and none of that was about managing humans. It was about like chemistry and biology and things like that, that I don’t use at all anymore.
But learning how to do this is open some of the biggest doors in your business and life. Yeah. Said my friend, I think it’s absolutely the path to growth and freedom as an owner. If you want your job to change or evolve or grow over time, or at some point you want to be a little less involved in your business, the only path to doing that is delegating.
And I’ll say this. I think sometimes delegating gets like a bad rap. Like I think when people say delegating, I think the image often comes into their mind is I got to beg people to help me. I gotta like beg people to do stuff for me. And I think the reframing that I would like to just offer on this podcast is really effective delegating is about empowering, [00:08:00] right?
It is about teaching, mentoring, growing other people. When you delegate tasks, yeah, sometimes you’re delegating things that are not worth your time, so to speak. Meaning that there’s people who make less per hour who should be doing it instead. But even that is about giving those people a real sense of purpose and growth and work they can be proud of, teaching them possibly new skills.
So even when you’re, quote, delegating down the ladder, it still is about taking those folks and giving them more responsibility, more learning, more, like I said, more purpose, and sometimes more money. For learning to do more things, making your team more valuable only makes you and your business more value.
And so I think instead of delegating, thinking I was begging people to help you out and do stuff, I think thinking about, okay, how do I empower my team? How do I share power? How do I share authority? How do I share responsibility? How do I teach and mentor them to grow and become better versions of themselves?
I think that’s the better version of delegating. And there are some real ways to do it poorly. And there’s [00:09:00] some ways to do it well. So maybe let’s dive into the kind of what we call the five rules for effective delegating. What’s number one, Ben? Yeah. The first rule of effective delegating is the one that I find the hardest, as my wife will attest, is to be patient.
Yeah. They’re not going to get it right, right off the bat. It took you a little bit of time to learn how to do that thing. It’s going to take them a little bit of time to learn how to do that thing. Yes. I know you’re paying them for that, but you’re going to have to be patient. Yeah. I think that’s it. I think often people only come around to delegating when they’re in a pinch.
They’re like, Oh my gosh, I’m so overwhelmed. I’m burnt out. I need help. And in that moment they want relief immediately, but often delegating is not a quick fix. Delegating requires you to be patient. Groom someone to teach someone to mentor someone how to do something that might maybe can’t be learned in five minutes Maybe it can’t be learned in five days or five weeks, right?
They might need some time to get good at that thing if they’re really [00:10:00] gonna own it for you for a period of time So yes, it’s okay to ask for help and to delegate when you’re at a pin a pinch and and burnt out but it’s better To delegate when you don’t need that quick fix, when you have the foresight to get things off your plate before you’re underwater.
So I think that’s a really good one. And it might take more than a single conversation to delegate. Yeah. That’s akin to, for the other GenPOP trainers out there, the client coming in and needs to lose. A whole bunch of fat in no time at all for the important event. And it’s like, like, did you only find out about this wedding yesterday?
Yeah. It, you know, you know how hard it is for them to do that. Yeah. It’s like, you’ve, I wouldn’t know what I would say this to a client, but like your client, like what you want to say to them is you’ve conditioned your body to be the way it currently is for the last 10 or 20 years. And you’re telling me that you want to make traumatic change to how you look and feel in 20 days.
It just, it’s a real tough. It’s a tough sell, it’s tough and we can talk about all the reasons for that in some other podcasts and all the ways to address [00:11:00] that. But I think it’s a good analogy, right? Is that if you want to delegate, do it before you need to, maybe I’ll pitch the second, I’ll share the second rule of delegating and we’ll go back and forth.
If you, if that’s cool. The second one is when you have the ability. To do this is to pick the right people. Oftentimes we delegate to whatever warm body is standing near us when we decide we want to delegate, right? Myself included. Sometimes like who’s around, who’s got an extra 10 minutes. I just will pick whoever person is nearby and seems to have time.
But if you’re big enough that you have a team and you have choices and options for who you delegate to, you want to be thoughtful about it. Delegating is almost like hiring where you really want to pick the right person for the right job. They have the right. Skillset and competency and temperament to be good at the task, right?
And so when you can pick the right person, it makes all the difference to having success in delegating that thing once and for all and maybe getting it off your plate for good. Anything you’d add to that, Ben? Yeah. Assuming you’re not doing this in the heat of the moment, just looking for a [00:12:00] warm body like.
If you take 30 seconds to reflect, you can pick the top three things that go into making that thing successful. Is it something where it’s like customer service and then to think quick on their toes and have lots of empathy? Is it organizing things in a logical way? So you want someone who like thinking alphabetically might be a good way to do that.
And you probably already know which people on your team have some of those strengths. Cause they may or may not need to do this thing forever, but you just need a little bit of help with something. Give it to the person who’s probably the most likely to win rather than the person who’s like, Oh, that trainer doesn’t work a whole lot this week.
Maybe they can do this thing. Yeah. That’s it. It’s like the task requires a great attention to detail. Don’t give it to that person who has no freaking attention to detail, right? Sometimes it’s obvious like that, other times it’s not, but when it’s obvious, you want to find the right person. All right. So that number one is be patient.
Number two, pick the right people when you can. What’s number three, Ben? Number three is make sure they know why, and I’ve actually got like a very quick story for this one to hit this point a long time ago, one of my managers, office manager, her name was Kat. She did a lot of like [00:13:00] admin y stuff, but her superpower was being in front of people and helping them get results, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to put these pieces together, but something finally clicked with her from a way I explained it differently.
Of like why doing that admin task was so important and the minute she understood that is directly proportional to people’s experience and results and quality of life. Yeah. And this was a task like pre booking sessions or something that like wasn’t rocket science here. She was like, Oh my God, that has been reframed for me now that I understand the importance of this.
I’m going to nail it. And it was the difference between somebody checking the box, so to speak, and taking responsibility for the outcome. Great story. I think what a great example. Someone who wanted to do a good job, but just knowing, Oh wait, I know I have attention to detail. I know we can do this, but why does this matter?
And getting people to understand like the why behind the what is so critical. Because sometimes we only tell them here, just do this and we never tell them why we never really tell them how, which we’re going to get to in a second. But I think that’s a really good example, Ben, of that. It just [00:14:00] knowing why I reframed how important it was for that person.
Yeah. What a good one. Number four, number four. Oh, sorry. Did you want to say something? I was just thanking you for your feedback. Oh yeah, nailed it. Um, number four, uh, on our list of five, so, uh, almost there, almost home here, is you gotta train people. If you want someone to learn a new skill, uh, that they haven’t maybe done before, haven’t done consistently, or maybe they’ve never even heard of, you have to train them to do it.
A single conversation is often not enough to delegate a task to someone. Hey Ben, I need some help running payroll. Can you do that for me? It’s like probably not the way you want to delegate running payroll. And many of you know this because we teach our clients to do new things all the time. Oftentimes you use models like the tell, show, do method.
You all do this as trainers, right? You demonstrate the thing and then you ask them to do it and you give them feedback, right? And so that same process of teaching someone how to do the task applies here. And so if you think that, again, delegating is going to be a [00:15:00] quick fix where within one conversation, you can get something off your plate.
Sometimes, maybe, but more times than not, you need to really spend some time training them to make sure they really understand what they’re being asked to do, and they’ve proven their competence in being able to do it. Anything you would add to number four there? It ties into rule number one, step number one of being patient, that we’re going to have to tell them, show them, get them to do it, have them apply it.
Like there is going to be a little bit till they get it right. And I fell into the trap of, here’s the SOP, do the thing and let me know if you get stuck rather than tell you what to do, show you how to do it. Let’s do it together. Now I’ll sit by you while you do it. You get the idea that it takes time to learn this.
It’s not just a client knees out when you squat and they’re like. Thanks. I’m good forever coach. Yeah. See you later. And we hear this all the time as coaches, right? I’m sure you’ll agree with us, Ben. And if our whole coaching team was on this call, they’d all be nodding their heads, which is we hear from people all the time who do like a down and dirty job at delegating.
And they get on this call with us and yeah, I [00:16:00] asked them all to do it, but it’s not happening. It’s been weeks and I’ve tried to get them all to do this thing and they’re still just not doing it consistently. I’m like, okay, walk me through. Like, how did you train them? Like I sent them the email. I was like, that’s not it.
Right? If they don’t know how to, and I’m not making fun, right? Like, I don’t wanna say, I’m like, I’m poking fun. I’m being humorous about it. But that’s real. You’re busy people. And so sometimes you think just sending an email to one or more people on your team to do something is the end of the task. And in some small cases it can be.
But when you’re really delegating, which means you’re handing something off to someone that they are going to own for the short term, for the long term. And it often means, and, and it implies that they haven’t really maybe done this before. You gotta. Teach them to do it, which means a little teaching, a little mentorship.
It goes a long way. Yeah. All right. Want to bring us home? So we got, let me just to recap here. We got number one is be patient. Number two, pick the right people. Number three, make sure they know why. Number four, train them well. What’s number five? Number five is express gratitude. [00:17:00] This is something that you’ve said lots of times, but it’s praise people early and often.
So put yourself in your. Delegatees shoes. They know they’re screwing it up. They know they’re getting it wrong. They haven’t done it possibly ever. You don’t need to tell them all the places they’re getting it wrong. They probably already know. Yeah. So your gratitude Like some really well delivered specific positive feedback is going to have way more weight to getting the job done and giving them criticism of the thing they already knew they screwed up.
It doesn’t mean you don’t give constructive criticism, but be aware that what they need right now is gratitude. They need really good, specific, positive feedback. Yeah. Hey Michael, I was in a pinch the other day and I know I didn’t even delegate that super well. I just wanted to say like, first, thank you so much for taking it off my plate because I was super stressed.
And second, for the level of. Delegation. I gave it to you. Like you absolutely nailed it. Can we talk a little bit more about how to get that even more right next time? Yeah. [00:18:00] Thank you. Yeah. That goes a long way. Yeah. You said it so well, Ben. And I think so many people are probably listening to you and being like, yeah, I, that sounds very easy to say.
And you’re right. It’s very easy to say. We just don’t do it. We just don’t do it. It’s very easy to say, thank you so much for where you’re helping me off my plate. I know maybe I didn’t give you the most instructions, but you did a really great job considering what I gave for you. And let’s keep talking.
So I’m sure it can, I’m sure there’s ways we can keep improving this process, right? It’s like those words are not complicated to say, but we just don’t take the time to say thank you. We don’t take the time to say great job and really give that specific feedback about what they’re doing well. And the research is clear about how adults learn.
When adults are learning, the thing they need most is not criticism, but praise. When we’re learning to do something new, the thing that makes us better learners is the sense that someone thinks we’re on the right track, right? That someone thinks that we’re, we can do this and that we are showing progress.
And so when you have someone learning a task for the first time, [00:19:00] you got to give them some praise. You got to show them some gratitude. It’s a great way to wrap it up. So five, Five rules here, you got to do all these things every single time. I don’t know, maybe not, but I think that there are really great kind of pillars and rules to consider as you become more and more of an effective delegator.
Any kind of parting words of wisdom, Ben, for our listeners who want to improve in this area? Yeah, it may be in the, we’re getting caught up, but in the same way that as you’re delegating, they’re not going to always get it right off the bat and you’re going to need to go through all or most of these five steps to get it right.
You’re not going to get this right, right off the bat as well. So give you, be patient with yourself as well as the people you’re giving it to. And you could even, this is a term that I use from a separate thing, blow your cover and be like, Hey, I’m actually not really good at this thing. I’m looking to get better.
So here’s the five steps we’re going to go through. I want to teach you this thing. Now all of a sudden, you’ve normalized it and humanized it, and it’s not like I’m the leader and I’m supposed to get it right. Like, now both of you are trying a new thing together. Like, you’re both putting your white belts on, no one’s [00:20:00] expecting to be amazing right off the bat.
That said, my friend, I think you gotta give yourself some grace as you’re learning to be an effective delegator. I think that’s such a smart piece of advice here, and very tactical. Right. I love that idea of just tell them that you want to get better at this, walk them through the process that you’re going to share the five rules with them.
The more you can blow your own cover, blown your own cover there and say, listen, I’m not the best at this yet, but I want to get better. So help me out makes it even better process. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for a great conversation, Ben. This is a good one. I hope you listeners found this valuable as you all work to become more and more effective as delegators and managers.
And so last reminder that we’re going to be in Toronto, March 21st and 22nd links down below in the show notes spots will go quickly, but come join us for two spectacular days of learning and fun. I’ll see you on the next one, Ben. Thank you.

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