A tactical guide to working with EAs: How to make delegation your superpower
When leveraged correctly, an EA can be one of the most important tools in a startup team’s arsenal — freeing up space to focus on the thorniest challenges facing the business. But there isn’t all that much tactical information out there on how to specifically work with EAs — often, it’s just something leaders are expected to know how to do.
When it came to adding EAs to Levels, we took a different approach. Currently, Levels is a team of 47 people, and we have 12 outsourced EAs. Notably, our EA pool is available to everyone on the team, regardless of seniority — and we encourage everyone to make use of them.
I think support staff is one of the most under-utilized resources available to every startup. Fundamentally, you want your best people working on the highest value projects for your company. Any time your highest-leverage people are spending time on routine tasks that could be performed by someone else, it’s not only a loss for the company, but it’s limiting that person’s ability to reach their full potential.
What to Delegate, Automate, or Eliminate.
In “The 4-Hour Workweek,” one line from author Tim Ferriss stuck out to me: “Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which now wastes your hard-earned cash.”
Eliminate: An interesting tactic you can implement here is the “anti-pilot.” When you run a pilot program, you test something with a group of users to get feedback. With an anti-pilot, you remove the feature and see if anyone notices. If you don’t get a lot of complaints, it’s a strong indicator that the feature wasn’t adding as much value as you may have thought.
Automate: Here’s a prompt to keep in mind: If you have a recurring task (daily, weekly, etc), you should almost always try to automate it. Even if it’s just 5 minutes per week, it’s hard to explain how much cognitive load they occupy.
You should almost always start by automating a task with an EA. At some point, it will become obvious that the problem is at such a huge scale that the only way to solve it is with software. But you’ll probably be shocked at how far you can go without using engineering time for automations.
Delegate: A useful way to think about the difference between an automation and a delegation is that automations are imperative while delegations are declarative. Another way to think about it is that EAs can do both automations and delegations, but computers are not able to do delegations because they need explicit instructions. Automations are also generally recurring tasks, while delegations are usually one-time or short-lived tasks.
I often talk to people who say they need an EA, but what they really mean is they need a Chief of Staff. Here are some clues that you’re actually looking for a Chief of Staff: