The Value of Delegation

To succeed in business, you must know how to make the best use of your own time and how to delegate what can be done by others. While your team gets on with the day-to-day stuff, you can then focus on the tasks that no-one else can do. You’ll also be increasing your team’s capacity, capability and skills.

Despite what many business leaders may believe, delegating effectively doesn’t add to your stress or workload, provided you do it right. If you don’t, you might find yourself dissatisfied with the way people are carrying out your delegated tasks. Then you’ll lose confidence in achieving your targets, and your business goals may start to look unreachable.

So how do you delegate effectively? These are some of our key pointers.

Choose the right people for the task
You should start by asking yourself whether you’re following a personal business groove. Are you devoting too much time to particular tasks because you’ve always done them yourself? Is it possible that other team members could now take them over?

You should then determine what outcomes you’re seeking in a particular project. Evaluate what skills and experience are required to achieve them, and especially what attitude a person would need for success. Assess your team carefully to choose the person who fulfils these requirements and will deliver on your targets.

If you can’t find anyone within your team, then you must ask yourself whether your team is fulfilling its purpose. We have helped many businesses to develop their management teams: click here for more information.

Getting it right takes time
Clarity of purpose is crucial. You’ll need to define your requirements exactly, and why this project or task is important for achieving your business goals. Will the project demand specific processes, and how will you qualify success? Determine how you’ll measure its progress, what milestones you’ll need to build in and how often you’ll need update meetings.

It will seem onerous at first, but the time you invest at the beginning will save you extra work later. You’re much more likely to achieve a successful outcome if you put in the groundwork, and you’ll be a lot more confident in the expected progress of your project.

Full delegation is a must
Once you decide to delegate, you need to go all in. If you want it done properly, the person you choose must have the ability, resources and time to complete a task successfully. You must also make them aware that they’ll have full responsibility for it, and will be accountable for its performance. That doesn’t mean they can’t share responsibility with other team members for parts of the task, or draw on their support – it wouldn’t be a team, otherwise!

However, your delegate must be aware that they’ll be accountable for the overall delivery of the project and should expect positive acknowledgement for its successful completion. This will be much easier when you delegate fully. Make sure that your delegate has total control over everything they need for the project to succeed. If you run shy and keep control of some aspects of it yourself, this will cloud the accountability issue if anything goes wrong.

Ultimately, you are the most expensive resource in your business, and it makes no economic sense for you to be doing things that can be done by other, less expensive, resources. Though it might seem ‘quicker and easier’ to do things yourself, you’re costing your business money by using time that you could be devoting to more important tasks.

Our team at BHP Consulting have all successfully run businesses, and we understand that every business is unique. Our practical approach to supporting our clients enables us to share our real-world experience to positively impact on the performance of your business. To arrange a call or an exploratory face-to-face meeting, please click here.