Delegate - Don't Abdicate
All great leaders are good at delegating. So if you want to break through to your next level of productivity, you must start off-loading tasks as soon as possible. Remember, time is your most precious commodity. You only have 24 hours per day, seven days in a week and 52 weeks in a year. And most of this time shouldn't be spent working!
Since delegation is so important, you must prepare properly for it. It is essential you make sure that the person that will be doing the task knows what to do. The worst thing you can do is to abdicate a task to someone. By this, I mean telling them to do something when they do not have the skills or the training to handle the task.
Often we will meet with owners of small businesses who lament that they have tried delegation and, except for the most basic tasks delegation doesn't work, because no one can do it right. When we dig below the surface we often find what has happened is really abdication.
For delegation to be effective, it is essential that you carefully explain what you want done, why it is important, how you want it done and what you consider a successful outcome to be. To be sure that your team member has understood and agrees to enthusiastically execute the task, you need to check point. By this I mean, ask the person to explain in his own words: what needs to be done, why it is important, how it is to be done and what constitutes a successful outcome. This way you will know for sure if you were completely understood.
When you are delegating processes, as opposed to simple one time tasks, you must document how you want your processes and tasks to be completed. I know this may sound like a lot of work, but the rewards are worth it. When you hand off a routine process you will be gaining time not just once, but every time it needs doing.
Documenting processes can dramatically improve the success of delegation efforts. You see, from my experience, most owners just give their staff a (quite often limited) set of verbal instructions. The owner then assumes that the employee knows what to do and the employee then assumes what he thinks the owner wants done. While well intentioned, this feeble attempt at delegation often does not produce the desired results. You see, it is a simple but important fact about human learning that only about 20% of people are auditory learners - people that clearly receive and easily comprehend verbal information. The rest of us are either visual learners, or kinesthetic learners. That is, we need to see (a picture, diagram or read) what to do, or we need to actually do something before we fully understand.
Documenting also forces clarity and often results in improved processes. (See last month's article on systemizing your business.)
After you have properly prepared, trained and given your team member the job to do, then let them do it. Do not jump in and save them or they will never learn how to get the job done. If you do, they will "learn" that you are the only one who can fix things. You have to let them fall off the bike to learn how to stay on.
We have some simple, but effective tools and techniques that can help you successfully delegate. Email us at coaches@actionbusinessdevelopment.com or call us at 905-943-4257.
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