Build a Powerful Support Team and Delegate to Them

According to Jack Canfield, every high achiever has a powerful team of staff members, consultants, vendors, and assistants who do the bulk of the work. This frees the business person to create new sources of income and new opportunities for success. In my opinion, this chapter may be more helpful to high-powered business executives than to the average person.

Practice the Total Focus Process
Jack suggests this exercise for finding the one, two, or three activities that best utilize our core genius, bring us the most money, and produce the greatest level of enjoyment.

1) List every activity that occupies your time: business, personal, and volunteer. Include everything, even small tasks such as making phone calls and photocopying.

2) Choose one, two, or three activities that you do better than most other people. Then, choose the three activities that generate the most income. Focus on the activities that you're brilliant at and that produce the most income.

3) Create a plan for delegating everything else to other people. This may take a long time, but Jack asserts that if you keep chipping away the things that are mundane, you will create a brilliant career.

I like the idea of delegating some mundane tasks to free up time, but I don't believe that everything else should be delegated. I get my best plots for writing novels when I'm folding laundry. And Joe loves the physical exertion he gets from pushing the mower around the yard.

I'm not sure that focusing so much time on our core genius is the best plan. I can imagine people becoming very self-centered workaholics who under-appreciate the people who do all of their grunt work.

Seek out key staff members.
Becoming an entrepreneur early in life is one of the hallmarks of the most successful individuals. So, if you're a business owner, start looking for a dynamic manager who could learn everything that you do. Then, delegate less important tasks to her and concentrate on what you do best.

When I owned a drapery workroom and suddenly found myself paralyzed, I could have used a clone to take over for me. If you're running a business, please be sure that someone else can do your job. That way, if you become ill or temporarily disabled, she can step in for you so that your business can stay afloat.

If community volunteer work is your business, find others to help you. College interns and local foundations can be very supportive. I trained another quilter this summer to learn my role as team leader. It was very timely, because I was injured in a car accident, and she was able to keep the volunteers working until I could return.

For stay-at-home parents, Jack recommends seeking out a house cleaner, teenage helper, babysitter, or gardener to help. For single parents, he believes this support team is extremely important and should be chosen with great care.

In my opinion, most single parents don't have the resources to hire others. After my divorce, I recruited my kids! They helped do the yard work, toiled alongside me to rehab an old house, and performed weekly chores. My oldest son chauffeured the younger kids to school events while I worked.

Discover why you need personal advisors.
Everyone needs a powerful team of personal advisors. Jack believes that your team should include a banker, lawyer, accountant, investment counselor, doctor, nutritionist, personal trainer, and religious leader. He suggests keeping in touch with these advisors monthly, quarterly, or semiannually.

If a person can afford these advisors' services, I agree that they can be very helpful. But if their fees send us to the poor house, they won't do us quite so much good. Bartering with professionals to trade their services for something we can offer may be a good option if we're strapped for cash.

Trust the team members that you've chosen.
Jack recommends off-loading anything and everything that takes you away from focusing on your core genius...even personal projects. He tells about a man who sold his home and delegated the task of leasing a one-bedroom luxury apartment to his assistant. She selected the apartment, hired a moving van, packed the fragile items, supervised the movers, hired a cleaning crew, arranged the furniture, unpacked the boxes, and put everything away. All the while, he was on vacation in Florida.

This idea of delegating so completely makes me squirm. While there are parts of moving that I dislike, such as carrying countless boxes to a third floor apartment, I actually enjoy the satisfaction of turning a vacant room into an inviting retreat.

I think that most of us would be more comfortable asking others to help us, rather than completely delegating anything and everything outside of our core genius to someone else. I believe this sense of needing to work as a team comes from I Corinthians 12.

This chapter in the Bible speaks about Christians as if they are parts of a body: The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body...there should be no division in the body, but its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (I Cor 12:12;25-26)

We weren't put on earth to do everything by ourselves. I agree with Jack that we need helpers and advisors, but I just don't think delegating so completely is realistic or well-balanced. Jesus came to earth as a servant to all, and I think we should be willing to roll up our sleeves to do even the most mundane tasks, just as he did.

Our executive minister took time out from his very busy schedule last week to help our daughter move. By doing so, he created an opportunity to model how a mature Christian man should help others. If he had chosen to sit in his office and simply delegate this work to others, he might have missed God's purpose for the interactions that arose. Like our minister, I would much rather be a servant leader than an absentee delegator.

Today's Challenge
Begin today to build a team of helpers and advisors to make your life more manageable. Look to your religious organization and surround yourself with successful people who can help you to become all that God intended you to be.

Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is founder of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul© and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com