Delegating tasks to your staff or hiring a consultant may help you with tasks that will free up your time to work ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ it… but you need to ensure the person carrying out the task knows everything required to complete it to your satisfaction – upfront!

Working ‘on’ your business allows you to:

• look for new ways to attract customers
• improve your business system
• monitor staff performance; ensuring your values and guidelines are being followed
• find new products
• analyse and beat the competition
• create new marketing campaigns
• enhance your business image
• find business partners
• and the list goes on

Of course, if you don’t want to work ‘on’ your business, and prefer to work ‘in’ it doing what you love, then delegation is great for handing out the tasks you despise. You may even have staff that would love to do that task and be better at it.

Each task you delegate should be briefly assessed against your employee’s level of skill and ability to carry it out to the level required; you will then feel confident the job is going to be done properly and/or professionally and your employee won’t feel overwhelmed. Make sure you provide ALL the information necessary to perform the task properly, skipping vital bits of information can cause problems and disagreements. Take the time to show your employee what needs to be done. You may think, “Well I might as well do it myself”, but when they get the hang of it, you won’t need to do it anymore, which is one less thing for you to do.

Staff are usually more willing to assist and more capable than given credit for, plus they may feel they are actually contributing to the business  and their  job satisfaction levels will increase, which turn, may produce better quality outputs and customer service.

Delegating helps your business in so many more ways than just giving you time to play golf or go to the gym. (more…)