As business owners, we know that to grow our companies and to have a life outside of our businesses, we need others do some of the work for us. We have all heard how important it is to delegate. Volumes have been written on how to do this. How to decide what to delegate. How to find the right people to delegate to. How to manage our teams. With so much information available to us, why is it still so hard to delegate?
Here’s a familiar scenario. Sally, an overworked business owner, decides she needs an assistant. She hires Jean, a very experienced, highly recommended young woman. She assigns Jean a few tasks. Late one evening she is reviewing the ezine Jean has prepared to be sent out tomorrow. “Ugh, this just isn’t right,” she exclaims. “This needs to go out tomorrow, so I’ll have to fix it myself. It would have been easier for me to just do it myself!”
Sound familiar? I hear things like this over and over again from my clients and colleagues. In fact, I have lived them myself. I’ve spent weeks finding just the right person. Highly recommended. Motivated. And then my results are less than stellar. What’s a business owner to do?
Here’s the good news. We can all learn to delegate. I believe there are 3 essential components to delegating successfully. I am going to share those with you today and, of course, give you a few tech tools to make things go even more smoothly. Don’t worry – many of these tools are things that you should already have. And some are nice to haves that you may want to purchase to speed things along.
Component #1: Crystal Clear Processes
You know how to do things in your business. If you didn’t, you would not have a business. But all of those things are in your head. And you are so familiar with them, trying to communicate them verbally to someone else doesn’t work. I know. I’ve tried.
I know. I know….Writing processes takes time. But it is time well-spent. You may think that you are being clear. I always think that I am. In my head it sounds great. To everyone else not so much In fact, my life partner Chris often notes that when I start talking to him about something he feels like he walked into the middle of a conversation. Writing things down shows where the holes are. You will see many of them right up front. Then let someone who has no knowledge of your business read the process and ask questions. More holes will show up. And soon you will have a process that you can hand to anyone to do. And what I found was that by writing the process down and following it myself when I did not have anyone else to do the work, I saved time. So much, in fact, that I was able to take a few afternoons a week off!!! That is the power of having processes in your business.
The key is to just start. Done is better than done perfect. Adjust as you go. Here are a few tech tools to help you get started:
- Create a document that is a list of steps using a word processor like Word or Pages.
- Create a flowchart documenting your process in pictures using Word or Excel
- Use Sweet Process (www.sweetprocess.com), an on-line tool, designed to help you create and share your processes
Component #2 Effective Communications
When we trying to do something new or do something in a new way, it can feel so difficult. It seems to take us twice as long. Doing it the old way would be so much easier. Make no mistake – things will feel this way as you try to delegate. If you are used to working by yourself, you can do things on your own timeline. When you involve others the rules change. No more flying by the seat of our pants. No more waiting til the last minute. No more writing copy on a Friday for a Monday launch. You’ll need to plan ahead. And you will need to clearly communicate what needs to be done and when.
This communication can start with two very simple tech tools – first a shared calendar. You can use Google calendar for this and share the calendar with your team. Plan launches and deadlines well ahead. For example, I had a copywriter working for me a few years back. She polished the copy for my monthly newsletter and put it into Constant Contact for me. I was always late getting the copy to her. Mainly because I would get writers block. And therefore the newsletter did not go out consistently. She and I had a meeting and I determined that I wanted the newsletter to go out on the first Thursday of every month. From there I had her tell me what date she would need the copy by in order to meet that deadline. We determined that I needed to have the copy to her by the last Thursday of the previous month. Those deadlines went on a shared calendar. We both knew what was expected of us and the commitment that we made.
Next use your email to assign and communicate tasks. I am as guilty as anyone about telling someone via phone call or a quick stop by their office what needs to be done. What I have learned is that I need to follow up those conversations with email. People are very busy and distracted. Writing things down (just we did with processes) can help to serve as a reminder to both you and your team member of what was discussed and what is expected.
As your team grows, project management software becomes a must. The advantages of using a project management package is that tasks can be assigned with deadlines, notes and questions about each task can be tracked with this software, and documents and calendars can all be shared in one interface, thus allowing all team members one place to effectively communicate.
Component #3 Smart Tracking
We go into the process of delegating expecting miracles. “Ahhh I finally have help!” What a relief to be able to say “Here — you do it!” Then we move on to our next 25 tasks on our own task list. And then the realization sets in that things either not getting done or are not getting done the way that we want. I like to call this ‘dump and run’. Once again, I am just as guilty as anyone of this. A few years back, I hired a bookkeeper. I would send her my Quickbooks files and scanned copies of my bank statements and she was to balance my accounts. Pretty easy task for a bookkeeper ( or so you would think). After all, I had done it myself for years. I paid her to do this for about 8 months. And then came the end of the year. Tax time. And I realized that my accounts were off –significantly. I ended up going back and reconciling all of the accounts for the entire time she had worked for me. I could have caught this earlier if I had checked her work for the first few months. And I could have saved myself a lot of money by letting her go sooner.
When you delegate, you need to ask yourself the question “How will I know?” How will you know if something is going to be completed on time? How will you know that things are being completed correctly? How will you know what team members are working on each day?
Reporting or tracking is the most important key to the success of delegating.
For software like Quickbooks there are reconciliation reports that I could have run. If you decide to use project management software, take into consideration what kind of reports can you run on tasks completed or outstanding tasks before making your software choice.
A lower tech solution is the 5-15 report. I use this in my company. I created an Excel spreadsheet where employees are to track daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. The report takes them about 15 minutes to fill out and me 5 minutes to read.
Remember to keep asking yourself “How will I know?” as the final step to delegating any task.
It’s time to make an iron-clad commitment to delegating even a few hours worth of work per month and not go back to doing things yourself.
Commitment to getting the essential components right. Commitment to finding the right team members. Will it take more time at first?
Absolutely! But the growth of your business, the ability for you to serve more people and the freedom to live the life you want demands it!
Recent Comments