Delegating Responsibility
It’s an exciting and daunting phase of business when we get started building a team and exploring the world of delegation of tasks. Most people find their way through delegation of tasks with relative ease, but if you’re struggling, this is how I guide clients.
Begin by listing all the tasks that require execution within the organisation, I like to use a whiteboard for this. In a column next to the tasks place a time value per week that is required to complete this effectively (this time value is constantly changing as your business grows) In the next column place the name of the person or the role within the organisation that executes the task currently, then have a column for who will be responsible for the task in the future and in brackets list the month/year that the person will be responsible for the task. What this exercise helps you to do is visualise your organisational structure, the time and load capacity of different employees, and the volume of tasks that currently sit on your plate.
As you start handing off tasks, your role within the organisation evolves and shifts - typically into more high value tasks that correlate with growth. This helps recover some time and breathing space, but it can often be a difficult and frustrating phase of business growth. Many people accidentally slip into an environment where micromanaging becomes the unavoidable norm and you find yourself, constantly checking over the shoulders of those you entrusted to handle the tasks. Not only that you’re constantly finding errors and mistakes in the accuracy and attention to detail. Leaving to a micromanaging vortex that can be hard to escape.
The real key to effective delegation is to delegate “responsibility” not just delegation of the task. We need to be able to connect people to the outcome of the task, not the task itself. This delegation of responsibility signals to the staff member that you are no longer going to be double checking or looking over the shoulder to ensure it's done, instead they will be accountable to the result of the task being executed effectively.
In my experience the best way to achieve this is to create an environment where the employee can “self report” on the outcome. If you are able to build a weekly accountability report, where key success metrics are recorded each week, we make the compilation of that report a key responsibility of the employee. Imagine getting an “admin report” each Friday at 2 pm with all the key metrics filled in for the week… each of those metrics has a target KPI attached. So if one of your admin metrics is - missed calls that go to VM, and your KPI is less than 3 per week. If the admin person has to find those details and provide a report each week, and they put something like 6 missed calls this week, then it allows them to self manage, they know that, that’s not the standard we are looking for, and they know that you know. So in most cases. You need not have to say anything, and the employee will take the necessary actions to improve this the following week.
So as you build a team and begin to delegate tasks, it's prudent to ask yourself - have I delegated the responsibility, or just the task?
