One of the most challenging actions for business owners to take is to transfer some of their responsibilities to someone else. Most owners tend to be fiercely independent, driven by a clear purpose and focused on specific goals they want to accomplish for themselves and their family.
In time, as their business grows, they realize they can no longer continue to do everything they have done in the past while still maintaining complete control. This is called “hitting the ceiling” and is something that the owner, as well as some of their key people, will encounter several times in their life.
Delegation is hard
There are many reasons that business owners, managers, supervisors and others who are responsible for an area of the business are reluctant to delegate. Some avoid it because they believe that training someone to do those jobs will take more time than continuing to do the job themselves. Others lack the ability to give up any amount of control. Many believe they’re the best person to do the job and do not consider that anyone else can do it adequately. Surprisingly, some continue to believe that if they just get more efficient, they will be able to continue to do everything and take on even more tasks. Managers, foremen and supervisors in companies may be reluctant to delegate because they are afraid someone with additional skills could take their job.
This thinking always ends up with the same unfortunate results. Their reluctance to delegate puts an artificial cap on the growth of the business. Unfortunately, the good employees who would enjoy taking on more responsibility and growing with the company will leave because they see their potential is limited and greater opportunities can be found in another business. Those who fail to delegate eventually burn themselves out, their own performance goes down, and productivity and efficiency are reduced.
There are many benefits when we delegate some of our tasks to others. When done properly, delegation increases the self-confidence and competence of those to whom we delegate, we learn the potential of our employees, efficiency goes up, and the leader creates more time to do higher-value tasks. We can put more emphasis on business analysis, long-term strategic management and build a strong stable of talent for management succession. Leaders can also reap the personal benefit of greater work-life balance or achieving personal goals.
Basic steps of delegation
Since many business leaders, managers, foremen and supervisors struggle to delegate, it is best to have a clear system that can be repeated over and over so it becomes a common part of the company’s culture. Here are some of the specific steps to take in the process of delegation for your company or organization.
- Identify what you should delegate. Start by reviewing a list of the simple tasks taking too much of your time. Tasks like opening your own mail, replying to simple requests, monitoring basic activities and similar tasks can easily be handed off to someone else. Next, look for items you don’t like to do, what others could easily do, what others suggest they would like to do or what you know others would be good at or seem to have natural skills for.
- Identify the skills and interests needed for each item. Most tasks require a certain set of skills, so be sure you are matching the task to a person with those skills and that the person has an interest in this additional task.
- Determine the best person with those skills and interests. You can do this by observing employee behaviors, interests and skills as well as the regular conversations you have with them.
- Provide a job description and standard operating procedure (SOP) for that job as well as the goals for what needs to be accomplished in this role. For some simple tasks, you don’t need to provide a lot of detail, but more difficult and comprehensive tasks will require additional information.
- Discuss all these elements with that person and get their agreement to do them. It is essential that you help the person clearly understand this new responsibility, your expectations for this new task or role and how you will monitor their performance. Let them know you will be available to help them during the transition.
- Discuss which of their duties they should delegate to someone else so they can take on this additional responsibility. This step is often overlooked. We can have a tendency to simply hand off a task to someone who is capable and interested, without confirming if they have the time to do it, which affects performance in their regular duties. When we know they are already very busy with their current tasks, we need to help them identify which of their tasks they can delegate to someone else.
- Provide training and a timeline to learn the skills. Don’t just pass on the responsibility and expect them to figure it out on their own. Give them adequate instructions to do the job at the expected level of performance and keep in contact with them on a regular basis until both of you are certain the job is being performed adequately.
- Explain how their performance will be monitored, which could include records, communication, feedback from others or additional methods.
- Plan to meet with them regularly throughout the process to be certain they are performing as expected.
- Provide encouragement, support and retraining as they grow into these new responsibilities.
Additional benefits
Delegation increases the level of engagement employees have in the business, gives them a greater sense of value and creates a higher level of loyalty to the leadership. This will create valuable depth within an organization. Winning teams always have a deep bench. Effective leaders realize that by establishing and reinforcing a culture where learning new skills and taking on more responsibilities are just part of the job, they will have employees look forward to new opportunities and not feel inconvenienced when asked to expand their role in the company.
