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The art of delegation

Delegation is one of the most important while running a small nt and yet most commonly misunderstood elements of running a successful small business. In fact, this is perhaps the most important subject to master, if you’re ever going to get your work balance right while running a small business.

Unless!

You learn how to properly delegate then you’re forever going to be working in your business and not on your business; this means you’ll be forever tied to your business. However, if you learn the correct art of delegation you don’t have to be working in your business all of the time.

The business can exist and carry on when you’re not there. The problem is so many people get this wrong. They think delegation is merely just handing over a task, which they don’t want to do, to somebody else. This approach often it ends very badly.

So let me share a few secrets that I’ve learnt, often the hard way, during nearly 40 years in business, on how to successfully delegate.

The first thing to do is to figure out what it is that you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. This should be part of your daily, working on your business practice, when you spend time at your coffee shop or wherever you’ve identified is the place where you’ve made that time to work on your business.

1 Identify your Strengths and Weaknesses

So you’ve got your tasks sorted out for the day and you’re concentrating on the priority items. The next task is to do a bit of self analysis. “What do I do really well? What do I do badly?” In my case, that’s easy. I type at the speed of a snail on Valium. So you do not get me to type anything; because it’s totally and absolutely inefficient.

You need to go through the same exercise yourself and work out what you’re good and not so good at. Then you need to figure out which of these areas you should you be delegating to somebody else. Because there are some things that you should never ever, in my opinion, delegate to somebody else; paying accounts for example.

In 40 years I never relied to anybody to pay accounts for me. They can bring me the documentations so that I can pay them. So others do the work and all I do is just pay the bills. But I do not allow anybody to have access into our bank account. So simply because somebody else could do it better than you doesn’t mean you should allow them to do it. Work out what it is you should be delegating.

2 Assess your team

Then you need to work out “do I have anybody in my team already that I can start delegating some of these things to”. Because again, you need to work out what the team members strengths and weaknesses are; there’s no point in me delegating a typing task to somebody that types at the same speed as me. I need to delegate that task to somebody who types at a speed of a lightning.

3 Clarify the task

The next step is to be absolutely clear as to what the task is that you’re delegating. You need to, usually, but not always, write out the task; the process to be followed to execute the task; your expectations of time frames and the quality of outcome.

Next arrange a meeting with the person to whom the task is to be delegated and go over the task and process. Make sure that you and they are clear on what needs to be done, how it’s to be done and the time frame for completion.

4 Set a reporting schedule

Let the person responsible know what and when you require updates on their progress. This may not always be necessary, but it is good practice to consider whether it will be required. If there is to be ongoing reporting, then you should schedule in your own diary those times when you should have received an update.

Now here’s a key point, especially in the early stages of getting this working properly, if you don’t receive the report/update on time, then make sure you have a serious conversation with the person, so as they know that this time round you are serious. The conversation should go something like “you’re going to give me the report yesterday, I have not received it; please make sure I get it today and in the future, let’s keep to that time schedule”.

Start off how you intend to continue, because if you allow people to get away with it in the beginning, then you are setting the tone for all future delegation.

Lastly, let me make this point quite clear. You can delegate the task, you can delegate the authority, but the one thing you cannot do is delegate the ultimate responsibility; as one American President once said “the buck stops here”. If you’re running a small business, then it stops with you.

Make sure you’ve got these processes in place so that when you delegate something, it’s not going to come back and bite you in the tail.