How to Delegate Properly

As your company grows, you will be forced to delegate more responsibility to the members of your staff. Here's how to decide what to delegate and what to tackle yourself.

Tweet

In the early stages of your company you're not just the CEO. Your roles include accountant, head of human resources, and customer service representative to name a few. But as you grow and hire more people, it falls to them as much as to you to make your company a success.

In the case of small businesses, the founder will often have a hard time relinquishing the complete control they experienced before they had a staff. CEOs of small businesses are "so busy just doing the day-to-day stuff, they don't step back and think, ‘You know what, I could make this a lot easier for myself and get better results for my business if I only delegate it," says Barbara Pratt the author of Own the Forest, Delegate the Trees and the CEO of Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida-based Project Leadership Gold, a project management consulting firm.

The more you can successfully delegate, the more time you will have to spend on the challenges that only you can navigate for your company. Or as Pratt puts it, delegating "frees up the top person to do their strategic thinking and make sure the big picture's being addressed." But it can still be tricky to know what to delegate, who to hire so you can delegate with ease, and how to check in on the people you've delegated to; this guide will tell you how.

How to Delegate Properly: Deciding What to Delegate

Some tasks are readily delegated because they require little creative interpretation. Phone calls, paperwork, and even bills and finances are often unloaded hastily onto new hires or outsourced to contractors. Delegating administrative tasks is "the first thing everybody thinks of because they hate to do it themselves," Pratt says.

Still that's no reason to skimp on those aspects of your business. Companies like Zappos and Kayak.com put a premium on customer service and as a result, they hire and train their employees in a very specific way to make what could be a rote task, answering customer e-mails and phone calls, a dynamic interaction that ultimately helps the companies' bottom lines.

But not all tasks have a deeper meaning; some just need to be checked off a list as complete or incomplete. Not delegating these types of tasks can waste your precious time. Pratt gives the example of a company that collects business performance data for medical practitioners that struggled to delegate at the right time. The company, which employs 20 people, had a major event that was a financial linchpin for them. Understandably given its importance, they figured they should put one of their top executives on it, however "putting on the event is almost all operational and easily delegated downward if they only trusted their people or thought it through how they could break the work down," Pratt explains.

So what's a good rule for when to delegate? Think about whether a seemingly simple task can take on an extra dimension that would improve your business. If the answer is no, get your assistant on the phone. If it's yes, roll up your sleeves.

Dig Deeper: Why Fly Solo? Delegate Work to a Virtual Assistant

How to Delegate Properly: What Can't You Afford to Delegate

Business owners are much more hesitant to delegate strategic and creative assignments because they often have a strong vision for just how those projects should turn out.

But stepping back from the details, even in the case of a more creative project, can be a good thing. You have to "know and value the fact that [the person you delegate to] is not always going to make the same decision that [you] would make because otherwise there's no point in having delegated," says James Baron, a professor at the New Haven, Connecticut- based Yale School of Management with a focus in organizational design and behavior.

Andrew Crapuchettes has seen the value of delegating creative tasks firsthand. The CEO of Economic Modeling Specialists, a Moscow, Idaho-based company that collects employment data and provides economic analyses for colleges and universities, was approached by his marketing manager about rebranding the company, particularly its Web presence.

The manager and his team ended up doing a stellar job, boosting the company's visibility, and Crapuchettes admits that, though he was nervous about ceding control of such a big strategic project at first, "if I had tried to micromanage it, or if I had tried to really ride the details of it, it would not have gone so well."
So what projects does Crapuchettes handle himself? He deals with big picture planning and the top echelons of new endeavors, such as forming high-level partnerships.

Dig Deeper: Norm Brodsky on the One Thing You Can't Delegate

How to Delegate Properly: Matching an Employee's Tasks with Their Pay

Another important tenet of delegation is to dole out responsibility in such a way that you pair a task with people who have the right talents and are in the right pay bracket. You don't want your $100 an hour employee doing the work a $12 an hour employee could handle, do you?

Well that's the conventional wisdom but Paul English, the co-founder of the travel search engine Kayak.com, handles customer support along with his engineers and people give him funny looks for it. "When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack," he told Inc. "They say, ‘Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?' If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore." Still unless there's some added benefit of having employees with higher salaries tackle seemingly menial tasks, it's best to assign work with pay grade in mind.

Dig Deeper: The Way I Work, Paul English of Kayak.com

How to Delegate Properly: Hiring the Right People

Smaller companies are often more flexible so you would think they would have the inside track when it came to delegating, but the opposite can actually be the case. At a large company, the roles and responsibilities are often parsed out very specifically, but "in a smaller company, the work is shared so much. Somebody may wear a hat today and then tomorrow they're going to be doing another type of work, and so it's less clear who's completely capable and comfortable in any one thing because so much of it is shared," says Pratt.

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: