by 3 years ago | 4 Min Read
As you grow your business, your workload will keep increasing as well. You might be an ambitious, effective, focused and driven entrepreneur but there is only so much time in the day to accomplish all of your tasks. If you find yourself struggling to get everything done to the standard that you hold yourself to, it is probably time for you to start delegating some of your tasks to other people that you can trust. Taking some of the weight off of your load will help you to focus on the specific tasks that you personally must complete for your business to thrive. I wanted to share 5 tips with you to decide what tasks to delegate and who to delegate them to.
#1. Decide Which Tasks To Delegate
The fist step to delegating some of your workload to other people is to take a thorough inventory of all the tasks you need to be accomplished. A great way to organize your tasks into different categories is to use the Eisenhower Matrix. There are 4 different quadrants that your tasks can be put into. They can be urgent or non-urgent. They can also be important or unimportant. Figure out which 2 categories each of your tasks fall into. The tasks that are important and urgent are what you should be spending your time on. When you’ve completed those tasks, you can then spend time working on the important yet non-urgent tasks. In the meantime, you should delegate the urgent and non-important tasks to other people. You should also be delegating the tasks that fall outside your areas of strength. This will allow you to focus on the tasks that you personally can perform at the highest level.
#2. Identify The Right Person To Delegate To
When choosing the right person to delegate your tasks to, it’s important to consider a few things about them. I like to think of this as the 4 A’s of Delegation. They are Attitude, Aptitude, Ambition and Appearance.
They need to have a positive attitude about your company’s goals and the role they will play in it. They need to have the aptitude to accomplish the specific tasks you want to delegate to them. You wouldn’t want to delegate a video editing task to someone without the necessary knowledge to accomplish that task effectively. You should be looking to delegate tasks to people who can perform them better than you can.
They need to have ambition and drive within themselves. If they don’t believe in themselves, that will bleed into the work they do for you, bringing you subpar results. They also need to present themselves and their brand in a way that is congruent with your own brand image. You want to work with people who align with your business goals and philosophies.
#3. Communicate Well And Often
Great communication is the first step to successfully delegating tasks to other people. You need to effectively express to them the details of what they need to do for you. You need to give them a deadline to complete your task by. Most importantly, you need to explain the reasoning behind the tasks that you delegate to them. If you can express to them the way that the completion of these tasks will positively impact your business, they will have the perspective they need, in order to deliver positive results to you.
#4. Follow Up And Check In Often
If you delegate a task to someone then just leave them to their own devices, you run the risk of them not performing your tasks in the correct way. You should be checking in with them regularly to see how things are coming along. Make sure that they are doing things in accordance with your business’ needs. See if there are any ways that you can be supporting them. This is about helping them to accomplish the tasks you delegated to them.
It’s much easier to identify and correct a problem during the process, rather than having to fix something after all of the work is done already. It’s better to be proactive than reactive. On the other hand, it’s also important to trust the people you’ve delegated those tasks to and give them the mental space they need to execute. Trying to micromanage every single step they take will have an adverse effect on their attitude and the quality of the work they do for you.
#5. Have Patience
Whether you’re delegating tasks to new people or you’re delegating new tasks to people you already work with, it’s important to have patience. It will likely take a little time to get everything clear and organized. You might have to do a bit of coaching to help the person understand the task at hand. As long as you remain patient through this part of the process, you will get to the point where the person you’ve delegated tasks to, understands exactly what they need to do. Once that’s happened, you will have successfully lightened your own workload, freeing up more time to work on the most important and urgent tasks for your business to thrive and prosper.
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I hope that you’ve found value in this blog post! Feel free to share it with anyone that you think will benefit from it as well.
If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on this subject, you can check out my video here:
If you’d like to be even more effective as an entrepreneur, check out my blog post on How To Choose The Right Business Coach Or Mentor.
