Everyone knows that, as an entrepreneur, you need to juggle a lot of hats and do almost every trick to ensure business growth. It’s one of the hallmark attributes of a small business leader.
There’s a point where taking on every task under the sun begins to turn against you, however. You can quickly get overwhelmed, things can get delayed, and if the situation gets bad enough, it can begin to sabotage your entire business.
That’s where delegating comes in. As a small business grows, it’s absolutely essential that leaders learn to delegate various responsibilities in order to scale their operations and eventually find long-term success.
What Does “Delegate” Even Mean?
While the term “delegate” is thrown around quite a bit, it’s helpful to slow down and consider what it means in the first place. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of delegate literally reads as “to assign responsibility or authority”. If you’re looking for a more business-focused definition, Inc.com explains the term in the following way: “Delegation is the practice of turning over work-related tasks and/or authority to employees or subordinates”.
While there isn’t a universal formula when it comes to precisely how to delegate, these definitions provide the heart and purpose behind the term. Delegating consists of passing off a job, a task, or a responsibility to someone else so that you don’t have to do it.
Before you start blindly assigning your entire workload to others, however, it’s important to realize that properly delegating work isn’t simply dumping off unwanted or excess tasks onto a staff member. Real delegating is strategic in nature. It aims to improve your business’s chance of success and requires important elements between you and your employees including trust, communication, and collaboration.
It also requires a willingness to abstain from micromanaging the situation once you’ve passed off a duty to another. If you can’t let them genuinely take over the responsibility, you’re likely to undermine the effectiveness of the delegating behavior in the first place.
Delegating also requires a humbleness on the part of the delegator. This includes a willingness to get out of your comfort zone. You must develop an inner confidence that quiets your insecurities, understands what you want, and recognizes that delegating tasks will help you achieve your goals.
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What Does Delegating Look Like?
While the concept of delegating responsibilities is fairly straightforward in nature, it’s worth taking a moment to break down just what delegating looks like when it’s put into action. There are a few different ways that delegating can take place:
- Giving tasks to employees: This is the classic picture that most people have when they think of delegating. It consists of taking mundane or simple yet bothersome tasks and passing them off to an employee so that you can focus on other things.
- Hiring professionals: Occasionally you may run into a task that no one in your company can handle easily. For instance, if you run a chain of coffee shops, you may find that neither you nor your current employees are able to handle payroll. In this case, you may need to hire an accountant and delegate the financial work to him.
- Going to a third-party: While this option is often defined separately from delegating, outsourcing a task to a professional agency or freelancer is still very much an act of delegating. Say, for instance, as the above coffee shop owner you have a website where you sell artisan coffee beans. Hiring a freelance writer may be a great way to delegate the task of creating content for your site.
There are many forms that delegation can take, but most of them fall under these three categories.
The Benefits of Delegating
Delegating isn’t just a nice way for a business owner to get a break. It’s one of the most essential skills that all entrepreneurs must learn to use. There are many different perks that come with delegating tasks, some of which benefit you, your employees, and your business as a whole.
Delegating Prevents Burnout
One of the simplest ways that delegating tasks can help your business succeed is by helping you avoid burnout. When a business owner takes on too many things at once, it’s easy to become exhausted and mentally overwhelmed. This, in turn, can lead to burnout and dramatic inefficiency with everything that you do.
By passing off time-consuming or mentally difficult tasks to others, you can lighten your own personal load. This will enable you to tend to your core responsibilities properly and find a little bit more time for some necessary R&R.
Delegating Enhances Collaboration and Communication
Collaboration is one of the pillars of a solid business structure. If your team can’t work together, it can lead to inefficiency, a decrease in productivity, and low-quality products or services. At Growth Hackers, we’ve seen delegation paired with clear communication transform teams into highly collaborative units that produce better results faster.
You must find the right ingredients to collaborate properly, including proper communication. If you delegate a task and then fail to follow up by properly communicating information and expectations with the employee, the attempt to delegate may quickly come apart at the seams. If you can properly communicate throughout the delegation process, you can not only avoid the negative aspects of poor collaboration but actually tap into improved collaboration in the long run.
Delegating Builds Employee Confidence
While delegating can have some obvious positive impacts on a business and its owner, it also has some nifty benefits for the person who receives the new responsibility. The simple act of trusting a member of your staff with a responsibility that you previously possessed naturally infuses them with a sense of autonomy and authority.
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Delegating Increases Productivity and Efficiency
When a business owner hangs on to every responsibility as their own, it can have the effect of blocking up production. By opting to farm out to others many of the tasks that are bogging you down, you automatically streamline the process. Delegation is like adding lanes to a busy highway: Growth Hackers helps you clear the traffic and let work flow smoothly and efficiently.
Sure, there may be a bit of a learning curve as an employee or contractor learns how to take over the work, but once this educational phase is over, it becomes much easier to realize a general uptick in productivity and efficiency. This is an organic result from the simple fact that you’re spreading the same amount of work across two people’s attention and energy.
Delegating Leads to Higher Quality
It’s tempting to think you can do everything better than your employees. After all, it’s your business. It’s nothing personal. You simply have the vision and a greater drive to get things done. One of our eCommerce clients tried handling every project themselves until Growth Hackers helped them delegate strategically, and suddenly their campaigns were sharper, more polished, and far more effective.
If you’re going to delegate things properly, though, it’s important to realize the fallacy in this line of thinking. While there are certainly unique things that you’re better at doing, chances are you’re not better than your employees in every way possible.
In addition, when you divide your time between a dozen different responsibilities, it waters down your own effectiveness, directly leading to lower quality results. Instead, when you take the time to learn about your employee’s talents, experiences, and skills, you can look for ways to match up their strengths with the various things you need to delegate.
For instance, if you have an employee who is a member of Generation Z, they may not have a profound amount of professional experience quite yet. However, their comfort with newer technologies may make them an ideal candidate when it comes to delegating your social media marketing to a staff member.
Delegating Minimizes Risk
Finally, when you consider all of these benefits together, a recurring theme emerges: properly delegating tasks enables your company to grow. Before delegation, a startup founder’s day was chaos and growth stalled. After embracing it with Growth Hackers’ guidance, the same company was expanding into new markets and doubling revenue in months.
Scaling a company’s activities is already a difficult task, but it becomes nearly impossible when a boss won’t let anyone else do any of the work. Simply put, if you won’t delegate work, your business can’t grow any larger than your own capacity, and no matter how large that may be, it has a ceiling.
Instead, if you can learn to trust your employees, communicate expectations, and then give them full autonomy to take care of tasks within your company, you can free up your entire enterprise to grow.
Delegating for Success
As a final note, as you learn to properly delegate the right tasks to the best individuals for each job, it’s always important to be there for your employees as they learn how to handle their new responsibilities.
As their employer, take pains to communicate important information, actively listen to their feedback, and be ready to tweak existing methods (not to mention your own specific expectations) in order to facilitate each delegatee’s own process as they get to work.
If you can manage to support your staff while simultaneously delegating whatever tasks you can, you’ll be able to set your business up for genuine long-term growth and success.
That said, Growth Hackers is an innovative small business branding agency specialized in helping businesses of any size with all things marketing so your business can grow to its full potential. Contact Growth Hackers today to learn how we can help you delegate tasks to your team members and/or employees efficiently.
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You can’t do everything.
You’ll have to learn to ask for help from other people if you want to succeed.