“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit” – Andrew Carnegie. Show me a small business owner who doesn’t like to delegate, and I will show you someone who will not be able to grow beyond a certain point. Small business owners are called Chief Everything Officers (CEO) who are required to take care of all aspects of running a business. If you do not have good time management skills you are going to run out of steam at some point.
A big part of time management skills is learning to delegate tasks to others. The problem is, not everyone feels comfortable with delegation for the fear that if they do not take care of tasks themselves they will not be completed to their satisfaction. This is a myth! From my own experience I can tell you that with proper planning it is possible to successfully delegate tasks and get them completed to your satisfaction. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day, and you have to go to sleep at some point! So what is the secret to successful delegation? Read on…
- Prioritize – Before you can delegate you have to identify the tasks that can be delegated. The ideal list should contain tasks that are not absolutely critical or those that can be defined and explained to others and those that can be completed in a prescribed timeframe. You have lean on the side of more delegation when going through the list. Looking at the importance and urgency of the tasks also helps you prioritize the long list of tasks and assign them to appropriate people.
- Divide – When the task is too big or difficult for one person to understand or complete it helps to divide it in small pieces that can be farmed out to different people who have necessary skills to complete them. I have written earlier about the guidelines to divide large projects into smaller pieces for successful completion.
- Standardize – This is the most important step that helps you delegate the tasks and still feel comfortable that they will be completed to your satisfaction. By standardizing the process for how to complete tasks you can remove any rooms for error resulting from different people handling it. When you think about it this is how all the franchise operators are able to grow and still maintain the quality of their products and brand.
- Document – To remove any further doubt about the quality you can take standardization one step further and document in writing all the steps along with other necessary information required to complete the tasks. Again, you must be familiar with the standard operating procedure manuals that franchisors produce to help standardize operations across the entire system.
Finally, the success of delegation depends as much on your personal qualities as it does on the person you are delegating to. You have to be open and flexible to accept the fact that others are equally capable of completing the tasks as yourself, albeit in a different way. You have to learn to let go and not micro-manage all the details of the tasks. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of delegation.
What is your experience with delegation? What other lessons have you learned?
When you first start out in business it can be uncomfortable to delegate if you’re not used to doing it. But there does come a point where you’re forced to do it, and after you have done it a while it’ll become more natural. Then you’ll wonder what took so long.