If you want something doing, do it yourself – right?
Wrong.
Here’s a surefire way of halting your business growth and propelling yourself into a stress vortex — try to do everything yourself.
Delegation is a painful but necessary skill to master (read that two times)— and if you want to build a business that doesn’t bury you, you will have to get damn good at it.
I’ll be real; delegation definitely doesn’t come naturally to me; believe me when I tell you that I’ve had to learn about this the hard way.
Remember, I said painful.
Full transparency – I’m guilty of regularly thinking, “urrghhh, it’ll be faster, easier, and better if I do it myself.”
We all want to get things done “yesterday” in the easiest and most painless way possible, and if you’re anything like me, you, too, will believe that doing it all yourself is the answer.
So, let’s set the scene.
When you’re first starting out, I know that you have to wear all the hats. You’re a team of one showing up daily as a team of eight — the chief rocka, the service developer and delivery person, the finance team, the sales executive, the marketing department, the public relations specialist, customer services, the coffee-and-cookie fetcher, and all things in between. You’re working 16 hours a day to build an exceptional business, and it’s working, and it’s exciting, and clients are paying your invoices – wooohooo!
It’s now time to put a strategy together so you can begin to achieve more of this good stuff, but you can’t because you’ve run out of hours in your day.
Or you want to take a few days off because you can’t remember the last time you took a nap or went food shopping, but you can’t because you’ve run out of hours in your day.
Or you want to get really good at this marketing stuff by doing a bit of personal learning and development via an online course, but wait…you can’t because you’ve run. out. of. hours. in. the. day.
How have you managed to run out of hours? Easy – it’s just you. So, the phone needs answering, and emails need sending, and proposals need writing, and services need delivering, and invoices need chasing, and social media needs posting and…and, and…you get the picture.
At this point, you’ll start looking at whether or not cloning yourself is possible. You know you need more YOU, and that means you gotta hire help, but a) how do you know you’ll bring on the right person? And b) what if this chosen person screws up all your hard work?
The answer is a) you don’t, and b) they might.
But, there are measures you can put in place to ensure your new team members are knowledgeable, confident, and on the same page as you so you can loosen the reins and start working on the business rather than in the business (*daydreams*)
Still not convinced? I wasn’t either. So I started small. I delegated a single task to see how easy it might be for someone else to alleviate the strain. It was a simple data entry task. And having it done in 60 minutes while I focused on something else was magic. I then worked towards larger tasks, slowly increasing the numbers and building trust in my new support team.
I’m still not 100% hands-off, but I’m considerably more “delegatory,” (warning – made up words again!) and my business has reaped incredible rewards for it. Here’s how I’ve made it all happen:
Step 1 – Delegate down
First, I decided what I could delegate downwards — these are often general administrative tasks where your time as a consultant or specialist isn’t being used well by doing them – think bookkeeping, inbox sorting, transcriptions, file and folder organisation, etc. You could hire someone full-time, part-time or even on an hourly basis to do these things for you via gig websites; it doesn’t need to be a huge expense until it needs to be a huge expense – by which time you’ve managed to build the business to a point where help isn’t an expense, it’s a necessity.
Step 2 – Delegate up
Next, I decided what I could delegate upward — these are the specialist skills, maybe accounting, legal work, graphic design, web design, copywriting, or public relations. Here you’re looking for experienced and knowledgeable people, so rather than spending the next 10 weeks learning Adobe Illustrator to create your visual brand, you can have a designer do it for you within a couple of days. Specialists are expensive, but they get things done quickly and, for the most part, to a higher standard than you or your cousin who studied art in high school could have done them. In the long run, you’ll save money and benefit from their experience in their field, as the deliverables will do a much better job. More importantly, you’ll have more time to build a bigger business whilst leaving them to do what they do best.
Step 3 – Now you have a team, manage them.
a) I cannot stress enough how important it is to be detailed in your instructions — give them more than the information they need (sometimes it helps to think of them as complete beginners, even if they’re not) when you brief them. Explain what the task is and why you’ve chosen them to do it. Ask them if they foresee any challenges with carrying out the task. Make sure there’s a clear deadline and clear deliverables. Talk about how best to handle progress reports and agree on how monitoring will happen. Ask if there are any questions about what’s required; if they answer with “nope, no questions,” ask them to repeat back to you exactly what the task is so you can be sure they have a clear vision of what needs to be done. We’re going for as little room for misunderstanding as possible, so as well as clearly communicating what you want, be sure to explain the purpose of the task you’re delegating and how it fits into the bigger picture. This kind of “what I expected vs. what I got” meme always sums it up perfectly for me:
b) Then empower them to do the job you need doing — a great way to do this is to define the decision-making process — when can your team member make a decision on your behalf, and when does it need to be escalated to you? It’s important that you’re both very clear on this. Then, trust them to do it right and, if there are any issues, to come to you if need be. Allow them to make the decisions you’ve agreed upon so that they can work independently – the whole point of this delegation stuff is to remove yourself from the thing. And remember, if they make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world, and you’ll likely be in a position to fix it quickly.
c) Don’t forget to hit pause on the “striving for perfection” thing — This was by far the hardest thing for me to do. I am a perfectionist, and for me, that comes from many years of unhealthy conditioning from my upbringing and the industries I’ve ventured into. Undoing this is a battle, and I relapse often, but what I have learned is that it doesn’t need to be perfect; it doesn’t even need to be done exactly how you would do it; it just needs to work. If you’re expecting perfection, it’s highly unlikely that anyone you hire will ever be able to live up to that. What’s more, you run the risk of making your team member feel like a failure and becoming demotivated because they aren’t able to reach your unreasonably high standards.
I’m gonna reference Apple in this post, firstly because they’re easy to reference (you know exactly who they are) and secondly because they’re very good at always being relevant. While they *seem* “perfect” with their sleek designs and sell-out launches, Apple are constantly updating and changing their operating systems which provide a base for many of their products. If they waited until it was perfect to launch they’d still be sat in a garage. I repeat, it doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to work.
d) Sounds crazy, but think about the long-term, even if it’s a short-term thang — train the team members you love with a view to them working with you in the long term. If they commit to small potatoes projects thinking that you’ll never hear from each other again after next week, you’ll more than likely get a half-arsed result. If you can invest a little time in their development so they understand how much of an impact their work can have on you, they’re much more likely to commit to the overarching mission and give you their best. You can develop that level of commitment from them by giving them the skills and support they need to do the best work they can. In truth, they may not stay with you for a long time, but the more time you invest in upskilling, teaching and giving constructive feedback to your team members, the better the results in the long term for you and them.
e) Listen, you gotta Let. It. Go. — not just an annoying Disney song, but also sound advice. Don’t micro-manage. Don’t call your team every hour on the hour to just “check in” or “find out how you’re getting on,” set a checkpoint (maybe at the end of the day, maybe at the end of the week) and just stick to that. Trust in your own ability to bring great people on board and take a step back so they have space to be brilliant. Don’t interfere in the process because unwittingly, you’ll halt the progress. The best managers know how to get things done effectively through other people. There may be some parts of your business operations that you enjoy doing, but this still doesn’t mean you should be doing them all. The idea is to remove yourself as much as possible from the everyday systems and processes so you can focus on leading your consulting business.
f) Finally, remember to say “Thank You.” — And give credit where credit is due. Your team shouldn’t need constant validation to get up and do the thing you hired them for, but recognising their contributions and commitment to the cause doesn’t cost you anything. And it goes a helluva long way.
There we have it – management advice from someone who is definitely still figuring out how to manage due to her resistance to delegating. It’s a process…but it’s a process that I’m glad I started.
You don’t need to do this alone, friends.
