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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses the essential leadership discipline of delegation—what it truly means, why it’s often so challenging for leaders, and how to do it well. Whether you’re leading a church, ministry, or any organization, this episode offers actionable insights to help you delegate more effectively and grow your team’s capacity for impact.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, continuing our ongoing dialogue about practical issues related to ministry leadership. Thanks for joining me on the podcast today where we're going to talk about an important discipline for leaders and that is the discipline of delegation. Now, I want to talk about this from several perspectives. First, I want to talk about the concept of delegation, what it is and what it isn't.
Jeff Iorg:Then some reasons why delegation is difficult and these have emerged both from my experience and from surveying I've done in teaching this in doctoral seminars over the years. Then I wanna consider some myths about delegation, and then finally, some principles that you can put into place that will help you to be more effective at delegating to others. So first of all, let's talk about what delegation is and what it is not. First of all, it is not. It is not dumping off work on other people.
Jeff Iorg:Some people think that delegation is giving up what you don't want to do. That is not delegation. That's dumping. That's just pushing off on someone else some task that you find distasteful or, frustrating or onerous or boring, so you wanna push it off on another person. That's not
Jeff Iorg:delegation. Delegation, on the
Jeff Iorg:other hand, is empowering other people by giving them real opportunities to lead and decide and do what will advance the mission of your organization. So delegation is not dumping, it is, first of all, empowering. It's saying to another person, I'm going to give you a real opportunity to lead something, to decide something, to do something that's really going to advance the ministry that we've been given. Also, delegation is about enlarging your organization by giving away control and multiplying your effort, not dividing your effort. Delegation is about enlarging your organization by giving away control to other people and therefore multiplying your impact, not dividing your impact.
Jeff Iorg:This is one of the hardest things about good delegation, and that is it means giving away some control. That you give up the opportunity to lead and decide and do something. You empower someone in these ways, and then you enlarge the organization by giving them the control in those areas and allowing them the freedom to do what they think is best in those moments. That's true delegation. And this is why the first reason that some people don't like to delegate or why delegation is difficult, and that is they don't wanna give up control.
Jeff Iorg:Now, this is kind of the dirty little secret about delegating. Some people don't wanna do it because they don't want to give up control. Now, the reasons for that could be many. Perhaps they don't wanna give up control because they're insecure, and they feel like they need to maintain control to validate themselves in the organization. Sometimes they, don't wanna give up control because they just like doing things, and they want they get a lot of satisfaction out of doing things, and so therefore, they they they don't wanna give up control because they wanna maintain the control so they can keep on doing that, which they've been doing, which they get so much satisfaction from.
Jeff Iorg:A lot of reasons why we don't wanna give up control, but good delegation gives up the opportunity to lead, decide, and do, and actually invest it in another person, and gives them some control over your organization. Now that's the first reason why it's difficult because we don't wanna give up control, but here's another one. We don't wanna delegate because we get value or a sense of esteem from doing things for others. I know I do. I know that when I do something that benefits others and blesses the organization or encourages employees or serves constituents or in the case of a pastor takes care of members or impacts the community in some meaningful way, I get a lot of pleasure out of doing that.
Jeff Iorg:I I get a a sense of value out of that. I, my esteem goes up when I do those things. To delegate them to other people means that I'm giving away the opportunity to lead, decide, or do in those areas, and I'm allowing someone else to feel the value of doing those things and someone else's esteem to be raised by doing those things, someone else to have the positive vibes, if you will, of
Jeff Iorg:the impact they're making by doing those things. Now, like, for example,
Jeff Iorg:I really like preaching. And when I'm given the opportunity to preach in a context like a church or a camp or a conference, I really enjoy that. And when I look back on my ministry as a pastor, I found I I remember that I did almost all the preaching. I very seldom invited anyone else to preach unless I was going to be away on vacation or something like that. Now I look back on that with some regret because I don't feel like that I did enough to develop the other preachers around me, young men who had the potential or the capacity, I didn't really do enough to develop them because I wanted to keep it for myself because I got such value or such esteem or such a sense of well-being from doing it that I didn't really wanna delegate that to anyone else or even share it with anyone else.
Jeff Iorg:So one reason delegation is difficult is we we like doing stuff and we don't wanna give it away. And another one is we get value and esteem from doing things and we don't wanna give those things away. And related to that is another one is we like being appreciated. I mean, when someone comes along and says, man, you're really good at organizing things, or man, you're really good at empathy and how you care for hurting people. Well, you don't wanna give that away because that's the source of the strokes that you're getting, the the positive, affirmation that's coming your way.
Jeff Iorg:But making the choice to delegate some of that can be very difficult. You know, another reason we don't like to delegate is in ministry, we don't really make anything. We we don't produce a product like at the end of the day where you can say we made this much money or we made this many widgets or we accomplished this many, you know, on the assembly line. We we don't produce something that's measurable every single day. So when we're involved in something that really does make us feel useful and we know really does matter to the organization, it's really hard to think about giving that away because that's one of the ways that validates and causes people to appreciate and causes us to feel a sense of of investment in what we're really accomplishing.
Jeff Iorg:So it's hard to give those things up. Here's a couple of uglier reasons. We also don't like to delegate because, quite honestly, we we can feel a little arrogant about our strengths. We think that we do things well. Maybe we think we do everything well.
Jeff Iorg:I once talked to a pastor who had experienced some pretty substantial burnout. And I said, what drove you to keep working so many long hours day after day after day? And he said, because I wanted things done the right way. And he equated the right way with his way. So he was not able to delegate anything out to others because he arrogantly thought that his way was the right way, his way was the best way, his way was the way of excellence, and he couldn't share the work with anyone else because they might not do it his way.
Jeff Iorg:Another negative that goes along with this is, we're we're insecure. We don't wanna delegate because someone might do something better than us. Someone might show us up. And so we hold on to things because we don't want other people to be successful and in some way diminish our leadership or our role in the organization. Well, another reason that some people don't like to delegate, and this one's come up in several classes that I've taught on this subject, and that is we don't like to delegate because we don't wanna be held responsible for the actions of others.
Jeff Iorg:Now, this is a real problem in ministry leadership. Because when you delegate, when you really give someone the opportunity to lead, decide, and do something, when you really give it over to them, they're going to sometimes make mistakes. They're not gonna follow through. They're gonna come up short, and that may reflect badly back on you. And so because we don't wanna be held responsible for the actions of others, especially the failures or the shortcomings of others, because of that, we don't wanna delegate anything because we don't want it coming back on us.
Jeff Iorg:And if it's gonna come back on us anyway, we might as well just do it ourselves. So we're afraid of being held responsible, so we neglect to delegate. Okay. Here's another reason I've observed, and that is we don't delegate because we underestimate what others can do. We underestimate what others can do, and coupled with that is we overestimate what we can do.
Jeff Iorg:You know, when I first started out as a pastor many years ago, I had been a minister to children and had done some pretty successful vacation bible schools, at least I thought they were successful. I went to my first church, and I'd only been there a couple of weeks when one of the women came to see me and said, pastor, it's time for us to start getting ready for Vacation Bible School. And the way we do it in our church is there are two women that are the directors, and we alternate it year by year. And it's my turn this year to be the director, And so I'm ready to get started on it. Now this was January, and the VBS was like in June.
Jeff Iorg:And I thought, well, that's really great, and I'm new, and I don't have time to work on this right now. So I said to her, you why don't you just go ahead and be the director this year? And she said, okay. That'll be fine. She said, we normally set an attendance goal for Vacation Bible School equal to the total enrollment of our Sunday school each year.
Jeff Iorg:Now my church wasn't huge, but our total enrollment in Sunday school was about 200, and our average Sunday school attendance was probably about 90 to a 100, somewhere in that number. Now, I'm not talking about children. I'm talking about the whole church. But she said, we usually set a goal of having the size of bible school that is the enrollment of our whole Sunday school. And I thought to myself, she thinks she's gonna have 200 children at a vacation bible school in this church.
Jeff Iorg:Okay, I thought. Well, this was gonna be a disaster.
Jeff Iorg:I said to her, well, you know what? You you go ahead and try for that gold. That'll be great. But I'm thinking to myself, when this thing falls apart, I'm gonna have to step in and and fix this. I I I'm gonna have to step in and rescue these poor people.
Jeff Iorg:They have no clue what they're doing. There's no possible way. So she went to work on the bible school. Months went by. First the first Monday of vacation bible school happened, and we were trying to have 200 people there, well, that did not happen.
Jeff Iorg:Think it was like 207, something like that. I was shocked because I had vastly underestimated the capacity this church had for doing Vacation Bible School, And I did not realize that Vacation Bible School had a history, like a heritage in this church of being one of the strongest things that it did. I had inherited this, didn't realize it, and significantly underestimated the people that were telling me they could lead it and overestimated my own appraisal of that in the situation. Well, one last reason that we, don't delegate is we're too busy or disorganized to delegate.
Jeff Iorg:Now this is one of the sort of paradoxical
Jeff Iorg:things about being a good delegator, and that is before you can delegate things, you have to get them organized in such a way that you know what you're delegating and that you can give it away in pieces that make sense to people who are gonna take on those responsibilities. People who are chaotic and disorganized and super busy, they're not good delegators because they don't take the time to sit down and think through their work so that they can then move forward by delegating it to others. So we've talked today so far about what delegation is and what it isn't. It's not dumping off work on other people that you simply don't wanna do. It is instead empowering people by giving them the real opportunity to lead, decide, and do, and enlarging the organization by giving away control and allowing other people to take the organization forward in ways that you were unable to do.
Jeff Iorg:It's difficult for a whole lot of reasons I just mentioned. Now, a couple of myths about delegation and then some keys to doing it more effectively. The first myth is that delegation lessens your workload. It does not. It only changes what you do.
Jeff Iorg:I still work the same hours I did before I delegated those tasks out. But now that I've delegated those tasks, I'm able to move on to other tasks. So my workload stays about the same, but the organization grows because I delegate out tasks and then I'm able to take on new tasks, which then someday I will hopefully delegate out to others and I take on new tasks. So delegation does not lessen your workload, it only changes what you do that makes up your workload. Then second myth about delegation is it makes your life easier.
Jeff Iorg:Delegation does not make your life easier. It complicates your life as your organization grows. The simplest ministry possible would be to pastor a small church where you did all the preaching and all the organizing, and you had a small number of people that you could care for on a daily basis. But then you start to expand and develop other leaders and delegate out tasks, and you know what happens? Now that church gets larger and larger and larger and larger, and suddenly it was 50.
Jeff Iorg:Now it's a 100. Now it's a 150. Now it's 300. Now it's 450. That's what happens over time when you effectively train others to lead, decide, and do, and you give away control and the organization enlarges.
Jeff Iorg:That does not make your life easier. That only complicates your life because now, through effective delegation, you have more and more and more responsibility that ultimately comes back to you. And finally, another myth about delegation is it saves time. It does not save time. It only changes how you use your time So that now you're using your time on other productive work than the work you previously did that you've now delegated to others.
Jeff Iorg:So we've talked about the concept, the reasons that are difficult, and some of the myths that we have to get past. Let's wrap up the podcast today with some keys to successful delegation. Let me give you, maybe seven of those. Number one, select the most competent people you can and then delegate to them. Now I say that carefully.
Jeff Iorg:Select the most competent people you can. The best people you can afford to hire, the best people you can recruit to your task, the best people you can find to do the jobs. Now you really need to listen carefully here. If you're looking for the superstar that's gonna come along that you can delegate everything to, that's called a chief operating officer or an executive pastor, that is likely not going to be in your future because most of us do not work in organizations that are large enough to have that kind of that kind of team. It may surprise you, but even here at the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, I don't have a chief operating officer who oversees everything.
Jeff Iorg:I'm responsible for overseeing the work that we do here. And so when I say select the most competent people you can find, the most competent people available to you, what I mean is if you have a person and you believe that they have the capacity to take on one important role that you can give them one thing to lead, decide, and do, but you can really give them that one thing and really give it to them fully. Select that person and delegate that thing to them. Now if you find someone who can handle two things or three things or 10 things, delegate those things to them. If you find someone who can take on only one thing, but it's a huge responsibility, give them that one thing with that huge responsibility.
Jeff Iorg:What I'm saying is that you're going to have different people around you who have different levels of capacity, and you're going to have to make wise decisions about how much you can delegate and what you can delegate to each one of them. But make those decisions, find the most competent people possible, and whatever level of competency they have, delegate to them to the extent that they're able to manage what you give them, and even maybe even stretch them a little bit to do that. But nevertheless, be re recognize that you can't just look for one kind of person to delegate to, the superstar who can take on everything. No. You're more likely to find people that can take a small piece of what you're trying to do in delegation, especially as you're working with large numbers of volunteers who can take on that one thing or that two things that will make a difference in the organization and carry it forward for you.
Jeff Iorg:So select the most competent people you can and recognize the varying levels of competency and the varying levels of delegation that have
Jeff Iorg:to go along with that. Number two,
Jeff Iorg:train the people you select both in their skills and in the culture of your organization and in what you expect from them. Train the people you select. Another problem with delegation is people want to find someone, give them the opportunity to lead, decide, or do, and then just turn them loose. But no, you have to train that person and help them to understand what you really want from them. And it really doesn't matter if they're a volunteer serving in a small capacity or the vice president coming to a major organization.
Jeff Iorg:They still need this kind of training. So for example, when I bring on a new vice president, I usually meet with that person once a week for the first several months that they work with me so that I can make sure they have the skills, but also the cultural understanding and also just the unspoken expectations that we have in organizations of what I really want from them. They will get that from meeting with me on a regular basis in the early part of their tenure as I'm delegating to them new responsibility, new opportunity, and finding out how much more I can give to them. That takes place in the context of serious training
Jeff Iorg:along the way. Third, trust the people that you select and train.
Jeff Iorg:Now I know this is hard to do, especially if you've ever been burned by someone who let you down, but you have to make a decision to trust people that you delegate opportunity to lead, decide, and do.
Jeff Iorg:You have to trust them. Trust their judgment, trust their insight, trust their wisdom, trust their training.
Jeff Iorg:I am thinking about a person specifically that I hired to work with me, I met with them weekly, and we came up after a few weeks of their employment to some issues in their field of expertise. They came to me with recommendations,
Jeff Iorg:And I said, well, you know, I've got some real questions about some of these things, but you're the expert. I'm not.
Jeff Iorg:So I'd like to talk through my concerns, but I want you to know that I'm going to go with you on whatever you finally decide. And I'm going to support you because when I hired you onto the team, I brought you here because you have a skill set and a set of expertise and training that we need, and I'm gonna trust you to take us forward in these areas. Now, do I always get that right? Absolutely not. Sometimes, I've trusted someone's judgment and it turned out to be
Jeff Iorg:faulty, but that's all right. We're gonna
Jeff Iorg:talk about how to handle that in just a moment. Sometimes I've trusted someone's judgment and they they made a mistake. We'll talk about that
Jeff Iorg:in just a moment. But most of the time most of
Jeff Iorg:the time, if I've selected the most competent person possible and I've trained them in what I expect, most of the time, their skill set that caused me to want them on my team in the first place or to want me to delegate to them in the first place, their set their expertise set that they're bringing to the table, the insight and the wisdom and the training and the background, all of that combined causes me to believe that most of the time they're going to get their decisions right, and frankly, they do. And one of the ways that will cause you to sit back and smile is when you have delegated someone to someone. You've delegated the opportunity to lead and decide and do on an important area in your organization, and they go out and do it differently than you would have done, and the results exceed what you could have accomplished, you'll find yourself sitting back with a smile on your face, grateful that you practiced the discipline of delegation with that person. So select the best people possible, train the people that you select, and then trust the people that you've selected and trained.
Jeff Iorg:A fourth key to successful delegation is to empower the people who serve on your behalf that have had delegated leadership opportunity and decision making and the doing of ministry to them. Now when you empower people, it means you give them a couple of things. First, you give them the authority that's equal to their responsibility. Now even when you're working with a volunteer that you're delegating to, they still have to have the authority to make decisions and make those decisions stick. They have to be able to select their team and make decisions about curriculum and about scheduling and about programming.
Jeff Iorg:Volunteers need that same authority as perhaps paid personnel do. Now, again, commiserate with the person's responsibility and the person's opportunity, you may have to make some decision about how much authority to actually give them, but they have to be given sufficient authority to do the job. One of the things I've said over the years in working with vice presidents is that I wanted empowered vice presidents, And I had to work hard at that, not to get them to do their job, but to make sure that I didn't infringe in areas where I that I delegated to them to get their work done. I had a clear example of this in one particular vice president. He he came to work for us on the first of the month, and within the first week, something happened in his area that was, very unfortunate.
Jeff Iorg:An employee did something that was inappropriate, and we had to confront that situation. The, vice president said, I will meet with the team the employee, and I will come back to you with a a report and recommendations. And I said, listen, man. You you don't have to do this. This is your first week.
Jeff Iorg:Okay? This happened before you got here, and and I don't wanna saddle you with this, and and I'll step in and and work on this. He said, well, mister president, I I really wish you wouldn't. He said, I know that it's not necessarily something that happened when I was here, but it's in my area. This person reports to me, and I need to take care of it.
Jeff Iorg:And I thought I've hired the right guy because he understands that he's been empowered with the authority to lead an area of the seminary that he needs to do that even though it's the first week and even though it's an unpleasant situation. He stepped in. He handled it well. And his esteem in the eyes of the seminary actually went up because they realized how well he handled a difficult situation right off the bat and how much confidence the people had in him to continue to handle difficulty in the future when it came up. So you have to have the authority equal to the responsibility.
Jeff Iorg:And then as a part of empowering people is giving them the resources needed, to accomplish what you've delegated to them. So if you say to someone, I I want you to lead the children's ministry of our church or I want you to take over, you know, the benevolence ministry of our church, and I'm gonna train you to do this, and I'm gonna give you the resources necessary, the authority to make the decisions. And the resources meaning the money, the space, the people, whatever it takes to get this job done, that's also a part of good delegation. You can't delegate something to someone and then strip them of the power to make decisions and the resources they need to get done what you've asked them to do. Well, a fifth thing that helps me in delegation is to recognize that even though you've delegated something to someone, that person still requires supervision and that supervision needs to be consistent, but it needs to be more in the form of coaching and correction rather than criticizing and demeaning.
Jeff Iorg:So just because you've delegated something doesn't mean you can forget about it. Just because you've delegated the opportunity to lead, decide, and do to another person doesn't mean that you don't still check-in with them, meet with them regularly, have opportunity to talk about what they're doing, and give them the kind of supervision and support that they need. Delegation doesn't mean give it off and forget about it. It means give the responsibility to someone else that you then continue to supervise. Now, again, depending on the person, depending on the responsibility, this could be a weekly meeting, it could be a monthly meeting, it could be a quarterly meeting, but it needs to be a consistent pattern where you're checking in with a person and they're checking in with you, and they have a sense of what you still want to be done and how they can continue to do it on your behalf.
Jeff Iorg:Then sixth, a sixth key to successful delegation is to expect mistakes.
Jeff Iorg:Expect mistakes, fix them, and encourage renewed effort.
Jeff Iorg:When you have delegated the opportunity to lead, decide, and do something in ministry, You've selected the person. You've trained them. You're trusting them, and you're empowering them. You're checking in with them weekly or monthly or quarterly, and they make a mistake.
Jeff Iorg:Well, first of all, you should have expected that. We all make mistakes.
Jeff Iorg:No one is perfect, and you can expect that the people that you've delegated tasks to will make mistakes. So don't be surprised by that. Expect it. And when one is made, fix it. Now it may mean that fixing it means they have to apologize for what they did.
Jeff Iorg:You have to train them that it doesn't happen again. You may have to lay out some money to correct the problem that it caused. You have to fix the problem. And then, encourage renewed effort to say, now that we've fixed this and you've learned from it, let's go forward and let's don't make that mistake again. Let's learn from it and let's do better next time.
Jeff Iorg:And then as that happens, people will have greater skill, greater trust in you, greater capacity for their work. That's just part of delegation, is expecting mistakes, fixing them when
Jeff Iorg:they happen, and then affirming or encouraging renewed effort. And you say, well, what if the mistake is so bad that they have to be replaced? Well, that may
Jeff Iorg:be how you fix the mistake. You may have to step in and say, you know, this mistake was so significant that we can't continue down this same path we've been on. And I'm gonna need to pull you back from this responsibility or curtail your authority in this area. I'm gonna need to give you additional training, or I'm actually gonna have to replace you in this project or in this role. Those are hard conversations, but sometimes that is the result of what happens when you've delegated to someone and it just doesn't work out, which leads me to this last thing.
Jeff Iorg:And that is when you reach a point where you feel like you're possibly gonna need to replace someone or change someone or not delegate to someone that something you've already given them to do, not just people who make mistakes. Replace people that you no longer trust to make the right decisions going forward. You know, when I think about the people that I've delegated to in especially the last twenty years of ministry, I can't think of a one that hasn't made a mistake at some point. Can't think of a one that hasn't either lost their temper in a meeting or spent some money they shouldn't have spent or, hired the wrong person. I can't think of anyone that I've delegated to that hasn't made mistakes.
Jeff Iorg:But when they've made those mistakes and we've corrected them and they've learned from them and we've moved on from them, that hasn't caused me to stop trusting them. But there have been a couple of cases where I just lost confidence in a person. I no longer trusted them. I didn't believe that they had the capacity to do what had been delegated to them and I could no longer in trust the well-being of the organization to them. And so in those contexts, I had to make really hard decisions not because the person made mistakes, but because we reached a point where the trust just was no longer there.
Jeff Iorg:Well, today we've talked about the importance of delegation. We've talked about what it is and what is it, what it isn't. We've talked about some reasons that it's hard and some myths we have to get past. And then I've tried to given you some practical steps that you can put into place to be better at this leadership skill of delegation. It's a skill you can learn.
Jeff Iorg:It's one you have to practice if you're going to do well in leadership and it's certainly essential if your organization is going to expand, enlarge and make a greater impact. So learn the principles of delegation and put them into practice as you lead on.