What is the difference between abdication and delegation?
Delegation is critical for every leader and every business. As a business owner, you simply cannot do it all! The key to expanding your business is through building a team and having others do for you. It sounds simple, but knowing how and what to delegate can sometimes be a challenge.
You’ve probably experienced this. You ask someone to do something and they don’t do it right. Or they take too long. Or they cause problems in other areas of the business while they attempt to do what you asked them to do. And then you find yourself thinking, “Fine, I’ll just do it myself.” Those are words of death to your business growth.
In an earlier blog post (Is it dangerous to hire a fantastic employee?) I gave some tips on how to build systems that allow your talented team members to thrive. One of my tips was delegate don’t abdicate. I think this principle deserves a little bit more attention.
To abdicate is to fail to fulfill one’s responsibilities. Too often small business owners abdicate their leadership responsibilities through delegation. It is costly every time. I had a client who didn’t understand marketing, so she hired it out to a marketing firm. Her small business was paying $5000 a month to a marketing firm. For her small business that amount was HUGE. To the marketing firm, it was one of their smallest accounts. When we actually started tracking where her business was coming from, none of it was from the opportunities secured by the marketing firm. She abdicated her responsibility of communicating with the marketing firm, tracking results, and even asking for updates.
We want to delegate like a boss. We need to delegate like a boss. So we have to show up like a boss and manage!
Here are 8 tips on how to delegate like a boss.
Have your team member shadow the trainer. It can be frustrating to pay two people to do one job. But most people learn through watching, interacting, and actually doing the task they are meant to do. When I bring on a new salesperson, they listen in on my calls before doing their own. There are some skills that just can’t be passed on through reading an operations guide or watching a training video.- Know what to delegate. The order of delegation will be different for each business. But here are some things to consider. What are you doing that is keeping you from bringing more income into the business? What are you doing that someone else could do better than you? What is not getting done that needs to get done? Those questions should get you started in thinking about what to delegate.
- Replace the freed up time with income generation. This one is critical if you want to delegate like a boss! Now that you are paying someone else to do a task, your company has to bring in more money! That means, you spend the time you are no longer spending on a task to do more income generating activities.
- Spend more time discussing the project. This is one of my great faults. I am such a big picture thinker that I come up with an idea and just want my team to run with it. It has caused problems on several occasions because they didn’t understand the project, or I left out some important details. Spend more time discussing the project in the beginning, and you will spend less time fixing problems later.
- Objective, brainstorm, decide, assign. This is the process I follow when delegating projects. I spend time as the boss determining the objectives we need to hit. Then I take it to the team, tell them what the goal is, and ask them to brainstorm the best ways to achieve the objective. When they come back to me with their ideas, I get to decide what direction we will take. And then I assign out the specifics of the project.
- Create a timeline for milestones. Most projects in business are interconnected. It takes multiple people doing their part in order for it to succeed. When multiple people or departments are involved, it is essential that you create a timeline for when the milestones need to be completed. One missed milestone can throw off the timeline for an entire project. The project needs to be broken down into individual segments, and then scheduled for when each thing needs to be completed. And if you are really going to delegate like a boss, you can have a super organized team member do that for you.
- Track the milestones. Have a system in place that allows you and the person directly over the project to jump in and see how all of the pieces are moving together. You could use a system like Base Camp or even just a google document.
- Celebrate team wins– It’s easy to go from one project to the next when you have a never ending sea of things that need to get done. But celebration is critical! One of my goals for 2017 is to do a better job building our team culture where everyone feels appreciated and where we take the time to celebrate together.
Have your team member shadow the trainer. It can be frustrating to pay two people to do one job. But most people learn through watching, interacting, and actually doing the task they are meant to do. When I bring on a new salesperson, they listen in on my calls before doing their own. There are some skills that just can’t be passed on through reading an operations guide or watching a training video.
Objective, brainstorm, decide, assign. This is the process I follow when delegating projects. I spend time as the boss determining the objectives we need to hit. Then I take it to the team, tell them what the goal is, and ask them to brainstorm the best ways to achieve the objective. When they come back to me with their ideas, I get to decide what direction we will take. And then I assign out the specifics of the project.
Celebrate team wins– It’s easy to go from one project to the next when you have a never ending sea of things that need to get done. But celebration is critical! One of my goals for 2017 is to do a better job building our team culture where everyone feels appreciated and where we take the time to celebrate together.
After reading this article you may be thinking, “Delegation sounds like work.” IT IS! Delegation without any effort or follow up is truly just abdication and I guarantee it will be an expensive learning experience.
The beauty of learning to delegate like a boss is that you can accomplish so much more than when you are trying to do it alone. You will sleep well at night knowing everything is in order. And you’ll watch your sales numbers increase beyond what you could possibly do on your own.