Delegate for Greater Success

Even "Super-You" needs help and support. There is no shame in asking for assistance. Push aside the pride and show respect for the talent others can bring to the table.

And, remember that there is no such thing as a single-handed success: When you include and acknowledge all those in your corner, you propel yourself, your teammates and your supporters to greater heights. - Author Unknown.

Do you feel stressed and overloaded? We all feel it at some time. I’ve been feeling a bit overloaded these past couple of days (there are many wonderful things happening in my business) so I did some reorganizing and found some additional tasks that I wanted/needed to delegate. Most of us can use some improvement in our delegation skills so I figured I would share my thoughts on delegation. Those who know me, know that I am a huge proponent of delegation – as long as you are delegating the rights tasks. See Applying the 80/20 Rule to Daily Tasks to learn more about what you should and shouldn’t delegate.

If you don’t involve others in your success then you will have limited success. Working as an individual, you can only work so many hours a day. There are only so many tasks that you can complete in these hours (let alone completing them with high quality). If you are good at your job, you will want more success.

But you can’t do everything and even if you try you will end up stressed, unhappy, and feeling like you are letting people down, including yourself. One of the most common ways of overcoming this limitation is to learn how to delegate your work to other people. If you do this well, you can quickly build a strong and successful team of people, well able to meet the demands that others place. This is why delegation is such an important skill, and is one that you absolutely have to learn and start executing!

To figure out how to delegate properly, it’s important to understand why people avoid it. Quite simply, people don’t delegate because it takes a lot of up-front effort.

Which is easier: doing something that you already know how to do, know the content, etc. or spending the time teaching and potentially documenting the process for someone else to do? The million dollar question you need to ask yourself is “is this a good use of my time? Is it part of the 20% of tasks that will generate 80% of the company’s revenue?”

It may initially appear that it is just easier to do it yourself then spend time teaching, documenting and checking on someone else; in the long-run you may be hurting yourself, the company and your employees.

• Invest time in your employees, especially if the tasks are repeating (or even if you expect that there will be similar tasks in the future). Not only will this offload some work from your shoulders but you will be giving your employees challenging work and helping to build their skills, confidence and makes them more loyal to you and the company.

• You don’t have to delegate to employees. There are outside parties who specialize in certain areas that are not part of your core competency (or can perform the tasks faster, easier and cheaper). I often encourage business owners to delegate or “outsource” entire functions of their organization. For example, Information Technology, Human Resources, and even Marketing can be outsourced. It may cost you some additional dollars but isn’t your time worth it?

• And finally, you want to be focused on your strengths, your core competencies. By focusing on what you do best and what is most strategic to the company will help you move your company forward faster!

Delegation allows you to make the best use of your time and skills, and it helps other people in the team grow and develop to reach their full potential in the organization. At first sight, delegation can feel like more of a hassle than it’s worth. However by delegating effectively, you can greatly expand the amount of work that you can deliver. When you arrange the workload so that you are working on the tasks that have the highest priority for you, and other people are working on meaningful and challenging assignments, you have a recipe for success. To delegate effectively, choose the right tasks to delegate, identify the right people to delegate to, and delegate in the right way. There’s a lot to this, but you’ll achieve so much more once you’re delegating effectively!