Effective delegation
Delegation is one of the skills that decides how far your business grows. Sales go up. The team grows. At some point you physically cannot do it all yourself. Effective delegation is how the business keeps growing past that point.
To delegate means to “entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.”
Most owners carry a set of reasons for hanging on to the work. Often they are excuses.
How many of these have you thought, or said out loud?
- “It is quicker if I do it… by the time I explain what to do, I could have completed it”
- “It is my business, I should be doing it”
- “There is no one on the team who can do it as well as me”
- “What if they do a better job than what I can do”
Every one of those is a symptom of the system. With no written process and no training plan, doing it yourself really is quicker today. So you keep doing it, and the team never gets the chance to show what they can do.
They are usually far more capable than we give them credit for.
Leave it unchecked and you end up micromanaging. That eats your time, and it caps growth.
Get delegation right and you build a strong, productive team. Your credibility as a leader goes up with it.
Why we delegate
There are four main reasons.
- Time. Free up hours to focus on growing the business. Stop being a busy fool when you have a team willing to step in and step up.
- Staff development. The team learns new skills and gains knowledge. Their self-esteem, loyalty and value to the business rise, especially when you follow up with them.
- Efficiency. For the team and for the business.
- Teamwork. People make new contacts and build their own network. You will see the team talking more with others, inside the business and out.
Now do the maths on yourself. Say you spend eight hours a week on work someone on the team could do. Over a year that is more than 350 hours of your time. Roughly nine full working weeks, spent on the wrong job.
What is that costing you?
How to start delegating
There are three things to get right.
1. Decide what you will delegate, and to whom
Give a clear picture of the result you want. Communication matters most at this stage. Spell the task out so clearly that nobody has to guess.
Have clearly defined processes and policies so the team can deliver. When people know and understand them, they can use them to make their own decisions.
Check the person has the right training and skills. If they lack either, put a training plan in place.
Set a time frame, so everyone knows when it is due.
2. How will you follow up?
Put milestones in your own diary. Check in on whether the task is done, and whether it was done on time.
3. How will you follow through?
Follow-through is where delegation holds or falls apart.
Say you delegate, set the timescales, then skip the follow-up. The team learns the deadline was optional, and you stop being taken seriously. If the task slips and nothing happens, they decide that is acceptable. Bad habits form from there.
When the task is done well and on time, praise the person. Then feed forward on what would make the next one even better.
Top tip. When you are weighing up whether to delegate something, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that can happen?” If you can live with the worst, it is probably fine to delegate.
Getting the owner out of the day-to-day is the core of what I do in 1-2-1 business coaching. If you want a second pair of eyes on what to hand over first, the free review is the place to start. Book your free business review.
