Delegate Today!

Delegation is an integral part of business leadership. You can't expect to grow your business beyond your personal efforts if you keep trying to do it all yourself. The idea of not delegating makes me think of a quote by John Maxwell, "One is too small a number to achieve greatness. No accomplishment of real value has ever been achieved by a human being working alone."

So many business owners complain to me about spending too much time doing things they feel no one else can do competently.

Sometimes they feel this way even when they know it's someone else's job and not theirs. While it may seem difficult to trust someone else with tasks or key operations of your business, you've got to learn to delegate while ensuring a certain standard of quality.

Delegate Today (Another Monthly Challenge)

Here are a few simple steps to becoming an effective delegating machine.

1.      Time Study

Start by doing a time study for a week. Make sure to dive deep and get super-detailed. Write down everything you do, even things that seem insignificant. Take time to do this in 15-minute increments, documenting everything you do throughout the day.

2.      Review Your Week

You'll have a comprehensive time study by the end of the week. Review how you spent your time and look for the common tasks that came up for you during the week. From these tasks, choose one for delegating. Create a "How-to" Document

The next time you face the task you chose, take some time to make a bullet point list of the exact steps you take to accomplish or complete that task. This list will act as the first draft of your "how-to" guide, which is a detailed descript of how you want the task to be completed to maintain quality. Also, consider using video to help explain your process. Applications such as Screencast-o-Matic and Loom are straightforward and make learning easy for the person you are teaching.

3.      Delegate!

This is where the rubber meets the road. Choose members (if you’re able to teach two people, you’ll never need to be the backup) from your team you feel are up to the task, qualified for it, or can perform the task as part of their job description. Finally, teach them your process personally the next it comes up.

Give them your "how-to" document and have them try to complete the task while you observe them work through the processes.

If you don’t have a team member to hand off to, I encourage you to go through the process anyway in preparation for when you grow your team. 

4.      Refine

It is always great to gain some perspective, and you should have the person you delegated to revise and refine the steps or processes on the document and see if you agree. Keep observing and refining until you feel it has reached your standard.

Conclusion

Once you've gone through the process of delegating, you've got to fight the temptation to jump back in and do the task yourself. Check to be sure the task is being executed to your standard, and continue to encourage, coach and train as needed. One of the best ways I've found to keep track of the most important metrics in a business is to set up a simple scorecard. This is a great way to track the key numbers your team is responsible for achieving.

Once you've gone through the process I describe above, you can go back to your time study and run the same process for other tasks. I recommend trying this process for a whole month to see how many tasks you can successfully delegate.

If you want to learn more about delegating, other helpful monthly challenges, business management, or if you have some challenges in your business that you'd like to talk about with someone who "gets it", let's book a call.