Official Portrait of President Ronald Reagan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere as long as the policy you’ve decided upon is being carried out.” – Ronald Reagan

Delegation of authority is serious business. It requires that you trust others with the authority to implement your vision. For a leadership team to be successful you have to be able to delegate.

Yes, your leadership team has to be all focusing on the same goal, but there are multiple paths to each mountain.  Some leaders surround themselves with other leaders who could be mistaken for their mirror images and don’t get the benefit of different perspectives.  When this happens, every new challenge has only one solution: the ones we already know.

While each individual is limited by their own knowledge and experience in their ability to offer solutions to problems; each person has a diverse set of strengths formed by their abilities, knowledge, and experience.

When people with diverse strengths are brought together, the ability to offer multiple solutions to problems becomes possible.

An ancient Japanese proverb sums this up well: “All of us are smarter than one of us.”