"I would never have achieved what I did without learning the art of delegation," Virgin founder and CEO Richard Branson said. Branson credits delegating tasks as key to his success. The first task he delegated was accounting.
Assigning tasks is crucial for expanding a business. Without delegation, your growth is limited by the time you can personally dedicate. Eventually, this will lead to stagnation.
Additionally, many tasks you delegate are likely things you would prefer not to do, and paying yourself to handle your own admin may not be a worthwhile use of your resources.
Great Leaders Delegate Tasks
"To be a great leader, you have to learn to delegate well," the Harvard Business Review (HBR) said. "One of the most difficult transitions for leaders to make is the shift from doing to leading." Doing everything yourself will limit your business's growth to the amount of time you can give to it, which is finite.
"In the short term, you may have the stamina to get up earlier, stay later, and out-work the demands you face," HBR said. "But the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands will eventually catch up to you, and at that point, how you involve others sets the ceiling of your leadership impact."
"While it may seem difficult, elevating your impact requires you to embrace an unavoidable leadership paradox: You need to be more essential and less involved," HBR said. When you justify your hold on work, you're confusing being involved with being essential."
Knowing What to Delegate
The initial step in successful delegation is determining what tasks to delegate. The primary challenges are: a) the desire to save money by handling tasks personally, and b) the belief that you can do everything your business requires more effectively than others.
These assumptions may work early in your business, but as it expands, trying to do everything alone can become overwhelming and hinder your progress. Even after recognizing tasks to delegate and having trustworthy, skilled people, emotional barriers might still persist.
These barriers can include:
-
Fear of being less important
-
Losing power
-
Having less control
-
Inability to say "no"
What Tasks to Delegate
Here are some questions to ask that can help you decide what to delegate.
What are you good at (and not good at)?
Begin by delegating tasks you're not skilled at or don't enjoy. Branson understood his weakness in accounting, so he hired someone who excelled in it.
Branson also differentiates between being up for learning new skills and finding people who are better at them than you are. "You should try everything at least once," he said. Then, "when I try a new task and find it's not my cup of tea, or I'm simply not cut out to do it, I delegate it to someone who is passionate about the work, knowing that person will do a great job."
Accounting wasn't his forte, so he delegated it.
Does the task move your business forward?
President Dwight Eisenhower famously categorized tasks into those that are urgent and important and those that are important but not urgent. The urgent and important tasks are the mission-critical ones that you should handle yourself.
Important but not urgent tasks, like accounting, can be delegated. One study shows that executives spend 16 hours weekly on busy work, including managing expense reports, scheduling meetings, planning travel, and inputting CRM data. These are tasks that are easily delegated.
Can it be automated?
The last thing you want to do is waste your time and energy on tasks that can be automated by a computer or software. For instance, marketing automation tools can generate email responses to form submissions, assign leads to salespeople, and create workflows to communicate with prospects and customers.
Given that executives spend 2-3 hours daily managing email, marketing automation can free up valuable time.
Does the task require your judgment each time?
As Eisenhower discovered, some tasks require you. Identifying these can be difficult. If each project is unique and needs a judgment call, you might prefer to handle it yourself.
Decisions regarding product pricing for large accounts or modifications to employee benefits, for instance, affect your entire business and team. Since these decisions are not made often enough to be standardized, it's crucial to consider whether the task can be performed repeatedly without your involvement.
Can you provide a straightforward process for someone else to repeat the task?
If the task is repeatable, can it be documented so that someone else can do it? Another obstacle to delegation is that executives think it will take more time to oversee someone else's work than to do it themselves. While it will take some time to get a process out of one's head and onto a document, it is well worth that time.
Executives may spend up to 12 hours planning a business trip, as they often have specific preferences for airlines, hotels, and car rentals, as well as airport choices and travel times. You can record these preferences so someone else can handle the planning, allowing you to review and approve the arrangements.
Do you trust someone else to do this task?
No matter how repetitive a task is, you'll struggle to delegate it if you don't trust someone to take care of it for you. Interestingly, it’s surprising that Richard Branson's first delegated task was accounting, since money is one of the hardest things to trust someone else with. Still, he found the right person.
There's no point in delegating if you constantly oversee the person's performance. At the same time, if you don't trust an employee to handle a task, you might not have found the right person.
Related to this: The Outsourcing Test: When to Delegate Work Outside your Company
How to Start Delegating Tasks
Once you identify tasks to delegate, you need to find the right people to take those tasks off your plate. If you don't have any employees yet, you'll have to hire someone. However, if you have employees with the right skills or the desire to learn and grow, you can involve them in taking on new responsibilities. To delegate effectively, you'll need to:
Be clear on the desired outcome.
Dumping work on someone else is not delegating. People need to understand your expectations of successful completion. They will need to know what to complete, by when, and how you will evaluate success. It also helps a lot to connect any outcomes to business goals.
You want to empower people to contribute to your success and take ownership of the task. This is much more likely to happen if the employee understands why the job is important and how it contributes to moving your business forward.
Provide the necessary resources.
If you hire a new employee to take on tasks, they likely have the necessary experience. If you hand off new responsibilities to a current employee, ensure they have access to the required training, tools, and guidance to complete the work. Onboarding with the right resources also shows the employee that you are committed to their success and growth.
Give them authority.
It would be best to allow employees to use their best judgment about accomplishing tasks. There's the way you did it, and there's the way someone else might do it—even better or faster. You must resist the urge to micromanage and focus on the outcome, rather than the methodologies.
Over-communicate
While you don't want to micromanage (you really don't!), you do need to let your employees know that you support them. Especially in the beginning, provide them with ways to reach you, like scheduled check-ins or a chat channel, so they can ask questions, share updates, and get feedback.
Be open to setbacks.
If you're a perfectionist, which you are, or you wouldn't resist delegating tasks in the first place, you will be disappointed. No one is perfect, and few people will perfect new functions on day one.
Additionally, a fear of failure can be crippling for employees, and it will harm your business if people are hesitant to introduce new ideas and practices. You want people to be enthusiastic about trying new things.
Take the long view.
Effective delegation also requires patience. Remember, the goal is to get routine tasks off your desk. Yes, you could do it faster on your own. Eventually, though, so can someone else. It just might take them a few weeks or months to get there.
Celebrate success.
The flip side of accepting setbacks is to give credit where credit is due. When someone takes on a new responsibility, let them know and share the news with the rest of the organization as well.
Celebrating success will accomplish two things: it will motivate employees to seek growth opportunities and allow them to know who to contact in the future for tasks you have just delegated.
Give (and receive) feedback.
In addition to celebrating success, you will get farther, faster if you give and receive honest feedback. If a task is not completed correctly or on time, constructive feedback will help the employee improve next time. It would be beneficial also to welcome input from the employee.
Did you provide adequate instructions? Are the expectations clear? Are there any additional resources they need to complete the work?
Why Delegating Tasks is Important
A Gallup survey of 143 CEOs found that "Those with high Delegator talent posted an average three-year growth rate of 1,751 percent--112 percentage points greater than those CEOs with limited or low Delegator talent." Executives who succeed at delegating tasks see faster growth, plain and simple. It doesn't always come naturally, but delegating is very important.
"I still remember how daunting it felt to hand over work for the first time," Richard Branson said. While there are emotional barriers that may stem from insecurity or ego, there is also a quality control aspect. You want to know that work gets done to your standards, and the easiest way (it seems) to achieve those standards is to do it yourself. Sooner or later, though, you will run out of time. That's a good thing because it means your business is growing.
Delegating Tasks Improves Organizational Efficiency
Effective delegation enhances communication across the organization. When expectations are well-defined about tasks, responsibilities, and goals, business functions operate more efficiently. Combining this with a shared understanding of success creates a well-coordinated and smooth-running system.
Clarity around goals, deliverables, and responsibilities also improves employee engagement because people can take ownership of their tasks and the results they deliver.
In conclusion, delegation should be a continuous dialogue. Employees seek growth opportunities, so avoid a "set it and forget it" approach. Over time, tasks may become routine and dull, prompting you to pass them on to the next person for more responsibility and elevate the current performer to a new role.
Delegate Tasks to Virtual Experts
More executives are turning to virtual assistants to delegate admin work. Virtual assistant service providers are experts at documenting task completion processes, and the best do the hiring, training, and performance management for you. Here are some of the tasks a virtual assistant can do.
-
Manage your calendar and schedule appointments
-
Plan travel
-
File expense reports
-
Enter leads into your CRM
-
Follow up on sales leads
-
Manage your email inbox
A virtual assistant can perform just about any task that you can delegate. Good ones excel at building processes that improve productivity and save time.
What You Should Do Now
If you need help delegating, here are a few options to help you:
-
Read our guide: "How to Use Delegation to be a More Impactful Leader" and get a better understanding of what tasks to delegate, how to delegate effectively, and how to create processes that save you time in your delegation.
-
Book a free consultation call with Prialto. We can help you regain more of your time by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks, and we will even train your VA for you.
-
If you know someone else who’d benefit from being a better delegator, share this post with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.