Delegating Helps Develop Your Employees

And gives you time to focus on strategy!

Particularly for small businesses there is a feeling that you, as the business owner, must do it all. And certainly if you are a “one man show,” this may be the case – initially. But at some point you need to grow your business and expand and can’t be expected to do it any longer. As pointed out by Nick Friedman in his article on Business on Main entitled, The Four Stages of Effective Delegation, “to grow a business, you have to work on the business – not in it.

However, there is a right way to delegate and a wrong way to delegate. If it’s done the wrong way – watch out! You’ll have more problems than you know what to do with and will put your business venture at risk.

First – let’s discuss the wrong way. Too often I have seen small business owners who delegate responsibilities to employees without providing training and guidance. In his article, Friedman tells the story of when he and his partner first turned over responsibility for driving their trucks to employees only to find that their truck was involved in an accident, clients were upset and furniture was damaged. One of my clients left to a new employee reaching out to clients who contacted the company through the website. Unfortunately, she did not provide any parameters around how and what to communicate to those potential new customers. The result, potential customers were turned off thinking the business disorganized and therefore unable to meet their needs.

Now – let’s discuss the right way to delegate.  Friedman discusses four stages of effective delegation. You can read them in detail in his article. Basically, he recommends that to effectively delegate you need to be sure that these steps are taken in each stage of the delegation process.

• Stage 1: The employee is provided significant guidance in what to do and how to do it.
• Stage 2: The employee is asked how they think it should be done and you provide them feedback (agree or disagree).
• Stage 3: The employee is empowered to handle the task on their own but report back to you daily.
• Stage 4:  The employee is empowered to handle the task on their own and will report back to you weekly or monthly.

Delegation enables employees to feel as if they have control over what they are doing and how it gets done. It empowers them to take ownership of their work effort and provides them personal and professional development opportunity. All of this leads to employees who are excited about what they do, feel a part of a bigger effort, and are engaged in the business. Very few businesses have career paths for employees. But rather than letting employees become stagnant in their roles and begin to lose interest and risk losing your good employees to another company, provide them opportunities to learn more and contribute through delegating projects to them to work on. It enables you to pass the operations of the business on to your best employees and enables them to contribute to the business’s success. And it enables you to focus on strategy. If you can’t focus on strategy, you can’t effectively grow your business and take it to the next level.

Your thoughts? How can you best share the workload with others so that you can focus on the big picture. What has worked for you? Please share in the Comments field below.

Disclaimer: This post is a part of an online influencer network for Business on Main. I receive incentives to share my views on a monthly basis.