Effective Delegation Tips For A Productive New Year
Delegation can be a difficult task for anyone, but leaders and business owners tend to struggle with it the most. Why? Because oftentimes the skills you’ve exercised so well to get you to the place where you’re at are skills that are difficult to delegate to others.
This might leave you wondering - Why delegate when you can do it so well yourself?
Because effective delegation can give you more time, energy, and resources to focus on the things that make your company more profitable and help you excel in your own role.
Easier said than done, right? Let’s take a look at how you can delegate tasks in your business to help you start off the new year off strong.
What to Delegate
A key outcome of delegation is achieving more things in your business than you could by doing everything yourself. For most leaders, figuring out what to delegate can be as difficult as the actual delegation. Here are a few tips to help you determine what to delegate.
Delegate Tasks Someone Else Can and Wants to do
Do you have a VA, contractor, or employee that supports you? If so, ask them the types of things they like to do. Do they enjoy data or do they prefer social media? By understanding what they like, you can start to think of tasks that they’d actually enjoy.
It’s also important to consider what they actually excel at. Do they have experience with bookkeeping, blog writing, or running reports? You might know some of these things from when you hired them, but if not, just ask. Here are some questions to get you started:
What is your past experience in [particular task]?
Describe your experience in performing [particular task].
What do you excel in?
What does your ideal day look like? What kind of tasks would you do that day?
Don’t have a contractor, employee, or VA? Contact us to get connected with one of our best-in-class VAs that can start taking things off your plate!
Delegate Your Weaknesses
We all have things we aren’t the best at. Businesses don’t scale by you doing everything, especially you doing things you don’t excel at. These tasks are the perfect tasks to start delegating.
If you aren’t sure which tasks you aren’t great at, here are a few ideas:
Tasks that take you a long time to learn or things you do so rarely that you can’t get the hang of.
Tasks that you constantly mess up.
Tasks that you constantly put off because you dread them.
Tasks that you constantly have to research to better understand.
Delegate Time-Consuming and Low-Priority Tasks
There might be tasks that you excel at, but are time-consuming, tedious, or less important. These are the perfect tasks to delegate. The best way to determine what these types of tasks are is to do an Eisenhower Matrix.
The matrix helps you categorize your tasks into 4 categories based on level of urgency and importance. All tasks that you indicate are urgent, but not important, should be delegated right away.
Then, take a look at your less urgent, but important items. Are there things that can be delegated to someone else and then scheduled? If so, work on taking those tasks off your next.
Delegate All or Part of a Process
You don’t have to delegate an entire process. If there are parts of a process that are time-consuming, don’t meet your skillset, or just aren’t working into your regular work day, then you can still delegate these parts. If needed, you can still maintain oversight of the important parts of the process.
How to delegate
You might be thinking, “I’ve done this task so efficiently for so long, it could take weeks or even months to train someone to do this like I do it!”
The key here is that you don’t need someone else to perform the task exactly the way you did it. You need someone to do it effectively. Period.
Train someone on the basics of the task, then allow them to figure out the rest. My general guidance to leaders is to train others on the what and allow your employee or VA to learn the how on their own. Nearly all of the leaders I’ve worked with that struggle with delegation are spending too much time on the how and not enough on the what.
The What (where you should spend your time):
In order for someone to effectively perform a task, it’s important that you share details around the purpose of the task so they can understand why it’s performed. These are the things you should spend time training them on:
What platforms you use to do the task and how to access the platforms. This simply involves the logins, URLs, and software you use, not how to use those platforms.
The purpose of this task and what you’re hoping to accomplish. This pertains to why you complete the task and what you’re accomplishing by performing the task.
Performing the task in the platform start to finish. This is where you show them how to do the task as you do it. Keep in mind, they may perform it differently once they’ve fully taken over the task. They just need a baseline for how it’s been done in the past.
Answering questions. As they get a chance to practice the task on their own, they’ll probably have questions for you around specific parts of the task or one-off situations.
The How (where you should spend the least amount of your time):
If you’re selecting the right person for the task, they’ve likely done a similar process in a similar platform before. They know their own skill level with similar tasks, so let them drive this part of their training. These are tasks you should spend less time training on:
How to use the platform in-depth. Nearly every platform will have tutorials on these sorts of things for their own products. Leave this to the experts. Instead, allow time for your employee or VA to research this on their own.
The step-by-step process of the task in detail. This is where Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) come in. If you have these created already, share these with them and allow them to perform the task themselves. If you don’t have these developed, ask that the other person create these as they learn the process. That way you’ll have them in the future.
Establish Regular Check-Points
Now that you understand how to start the delegation process, it’s important to continually follow-up on the progress. This is not the same as micromanaging. To avoid micromanaging, set up milestones and how to measure for success in each task. Then, let them run with it!
Start off by establishing a regular check-in based off the milestones. If they perform the task daily, start with a daily or every-other-day check-in to see how it’s going. Then move to weekly and/or monthly as they master the task and start to accomplish larger milestones.
When to delegate
Hire a VA right now. Don’t wait. As soon as you acquire a new process that doesn’t need to be done by you, start delegating it right away. In fact, processes don’t need to be fully flushed out to be delegated. That’s part of what your employee, contractor, or VA can do for you!
As your company evolves, so will its needs. That’s why it’s so important to delegate tasks as you acquire them. This leaves time for you to lead the company and better serve your customers.
One Final Note on Delegation
Mistakes will happen. The other person will forget to do something, not complete a task correctly, or miss a deadline. They might do all 3 in one day. This does not mean you shouldn’t have delegated to them. What it probably means is that they are human, just like you.
Use this situations as learning opportunities and coach them through it. Allows them to find their own solution or course correction, then support them along the way.
Failure and mistakes does not mean that you shouldn’t have delegated in the first place. Rather, it shows that someone is still learning and growing.
So be patient. Delegate often. See mistakes as learning opportunities. And vow to make this coming one your best year yet.
