Excuses, excuses. I’ve heard them all. “It’s faster if I just do it myself.” “I’m afraid I’ll forget to tell them something important.”
Sound familiar? You know that in order to grow your business, you need to grow your team.
Yet as small-business owners, there’s something in us that fights against asking for help. It’s almost like there’s some right of passage in being able to “do it all” ourselves. But the reality is, you can’t do it all and focus on your strengths without stretching yourself in too many directions.
Delegation is about handing over authority, and for many small-business owners, that’s a scary concept because you don’t know what will happen when you give up control. But the good news is, delegating doesn’t have to be scary-you have more control than you think.
Because when you’ve clearly defined what’s to be done and what the outcome should be, it’s difficult for a skilled assistant, employee or virtual assistant to be unsuccessful. The key to controlling delegation is to establish what the tasks are, how they should be completed and what the final outcome looks like before you assign the task to someone.
Photo by brokenarts.
Don’t Be Afraid To Delegate
May 6, 2008 by Rich | 3 Comments
In Employees, Operations, Strategy
XLOR on May 7th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Yes, familiar.
I am really so.
I don’t prefer to delegate my businesses to anybody because I don’t anybody now who could take it.
Besides, one friend told me once that a director of a restaurant must know how to cut bread to know his cooks swindle him!
Very useful advise, I think.
Ben Jones on May 7th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Well, I’ll admit it….It’s definitely not easy for me to delegate. Especially if it is an important task. I find it hard to believe that someone will gain as great an understanding of a subject as the one attemmpting to instruct them. My colleague, Christian Dorobantescu (who has guest posted here) wrote two pretty good posts about delegation a couple of weeks ago. Check Them out.
danakeith on May 15th, 2008 at 1:51 am
If you were to delegate task to someone else, better make it sure that your instruction is clear enough for them to understand what they’re going to do, don’t just let that person do it by themselves.. You need to go and check on them, so that they’ll know that you’re being in control of it.
They later realize that they should come up with the right thing.