Entrepreneurs are often very stubborn, and it might even be one of the reasons for their success. Often, entrepreneurs come up with the concept for a business only for family and friends to insist the idea will never work. These same entrepreneurs are often turned down by countless investors before finding a way to fund their new venture. After their venture is successful, they might feel like no one truly understood their vision in the first place.
Business owners and organisation leaders must eventually understand that roles must be assigned, and tasks must be delegated. You might be a business owner and have finally realized you need to delegate rather than obsess over every detail of your organisation.
Here are four things to remember if you are trying to delegate in a way that allows your company to scale.
Change Your Mindset
Entrepreneurs all over the world have defied the odds to become successful, and this may have taken a lot of time, work, and effort. However, founders need to realise there is a big difference between delegation and micromanaging your employees. How will your employees feel productive if it feels like they are simply following your instructions all day, without feeling like any of their own creativity or input is valuable? You must think about the fact that employees want their own sense of freedom in your organisation, and change your mindset to make sure you never forget this.
Figure Out What to Delegate
If you are a business owner, there’s a good chance you already understand your strengths. You might be the CEO of a tech startup, but don’t really understand the marketing world like you think you do – and may find yourself still micromanaging the marketers on your team. If you can recognize your own weaknesses, it can go a long way towards giving your own employees more authority and autonomy.
Similarly, there might also be aspects of the organisation you simply don’t enjoy. Why not delegate the role to someone who truly finds joy in what they do? You might hate updating your social media, but there are many social media managers out there who genuinely enjoy growing accounts for their clients. You might also love building a company, but have never been a fan of answering customer e-mails. It might feel like you are “giving up control”, but the truth is that outsourcing IT support to a reputable company like Computers In The City in London (no matter where you’re located) might save you a lot of money – and headaches.
Defining Roles
There’s nothing wrong with being a small business owner and having a bit of a chip on your shoulder. However, it’s important you recruit and hire talent that you trust. Your business might be successful thanks to your work ethic, but it cannot appropriately grow if you don’t have specific roles for individuals to fulfil. If you are hiring employees that you must constantly micromanage, it will affect the way, and the rate, at which your company grows.
You can’t delegate tasks to employees without being very clear about what you want and expect from them. It might be best to schedule face-to-face meetings to make sure your employees truly understand what you want, and it can prevent confusion down the line. You also will need to get into the habit of acknowledging your employees on their “small wins”, if this is something you have trouble with.
Instead of believing you can handle everything by yourself, you should be figuring out which employee is handling what, and be able to articulate reasons why that specific person has that role.
Use Technology to Your Advantage
There are few phrases in the business world more buzzworthy right now than “remote work”, and the fact that there is a global pandemic only makes remote work more relevant than ever before. However, there are remote work tools that can help your company delegate more efficiently than ever, and you might want to take advantage of these tools and figure out what works best for your employees.
Some organizations swear by Slack while other businesses believe Microsoft Teams is the way to go. We all know e-mails can help when it comes to assigning tasks, but you should have an open discussion with your employees about what tools they believe are best when it comes to delegating work.
Asana, for example, is completely free but also integrates with many other apps. The productivity tool has become so popular it now plans to eventually go public, and it’s just one example of the many ways you can use technology to delegate more efficiently.
Conclusion
We all love a good underdog story where an entrepreneur defies the odds and manages to build a successful company from scratch. We admire those who work tirelessly for what they believe in, and are finally able to show the market validated their products and services; in some cases, to the point where they may even have changed the landscape of that market forever. However, it’s important for founders and CEOs to realize they need to switch to a “delegation mindset” in order to succeed, and hire the right employees to take their company to the next level.
Your best employees will not want to stay at your company if they feel like their work is constantly being micromanaged, and you might find your organization cannot scale properly without these specific people.
This is not just about outsourcing a few tasks, or having an employee handle data entry tasks you find tedious. A true leader understands they can only attract and hire the best talent if that talent feels like they have their own sense of freedom, and completely understands their role and what is expected of them.
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