Letting Go: The Art of Delegation (part 1)
We get it. This is your business, your baby in many ways. It’s no easy thing to let go and allow someone else to handle tasks. The art of delegation may not be high on your list of necessary skills to run a successful company, but in the long run it can make all of the difference in the world. When you strengthen your ability to delegate, you strengthen your entire business. Let’s learn how this works effectively.
What’s Delegation?
Delegation is simple in definition and sometimes difficult in execution. It is the act of sharing responsibility or tasks with other team members in order to get work done more quickly or more efficiently.
Great leaders delegate smartly in order to reach goals, make deadlines, and avoid personal burn-out. Regardless of how talented or skilled you may be, the truth is you can’t do everything by yourself and even if you try, you can’t do everything by yourself for very long.
Why Is Delegation Difficult?
Delegation is often difficult for business owners for a few different reasons. Do any of these sound familiar?
No one can do it right.
This is my company so it’s my responsibility.
Explaining will take longer than doing it myself.
People have messed up in the past so they might mess up again.
To put it simply, a business owner might feel the need to be in complete control of every detail in the hopes that this will prevent problems or failures. This is common and it doesn’t mean you’re a control freak, it just means you’re a normal person in charge of a lot of responsibilities. Regardless of how normal this response is, it’s still not effective in running a business.
You must learn to delegate tasks so that you can focus on other tasks that might be of higher priority. There are some things that only you can do or that you are the most skilled at, and so those are the tasks that should be on your plate. Other tasks can move to someone else's plate. Let’s look at some of the benefits of delegation.
Building Trust in Your Team
When your team sees that you are comfortable delegating tasks to others, it helps build a culture of trust and confidence. If you’re constantly refusing to delegate it sends the message that you don’t trust your team or that you don’t have confidence in their abilities. This will eventually translate into a lack of confidence in themselves and a sense of being useless. None of that builds a productive team.
Opportunities for Learning and Growth
When you delegate tasks it also gives your team the opportunity to grow and learn new skills. This creates a stronger team in the long run and that benefits you in every way. Everyone doesn’t know how to do everything, but everyone can learn something. If you don’t provide these opportunities with real work tasks, your team will become stagnant and bored.
Avoid Burn-out
Business owner burn-out is a real danger and it can have lasting negative impacts on your business. One of the most effective ways to avoid this is by effectively delegating tasks to your team. Doing everything yourself is not a sustainable way to operate your business. Delegation will help protect your mental health and ensure you can be effective in critical areas.
Delegation is a crucial skill and that means it may take time to learn how to do it effectively. That’s okay, because learning and growing is part of business ownership.
In Part 2 of “Letting Go: The Art of Delegation” we’ll look at how to choose tasks to delegate and keys to effective delegation.
