How to Delegate Properly

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Still if you have a staff that you trust, you can rely on them to help propel the company forward. But what exactly does it mean to trust your staff? "Trust obviously comes in a lot of different ways," says Crapuchettes. "The person that babysits my kids, I trust them, but they don't necessarily share my business vision."
However, even in the case of your employees, when you have faith in their skills and abilities, it's not always the same as a shared worldview or vision for the company. Baron explains that, "one of the real challenges of building management teams early on in the evolution of an organization is to ensure the right balance of commonality and diversity." You want people to have enough common ground to communicate easily and yet have varied perspectives to avoid groupthink. Below are some traits to look for in new hires to make your job easier.

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One way to handle the issue of trust is to only hire people you know well. Baron notes that many companies will hire friends, family members, and former colleagues in the early stages of company building because "there's more reason there to believe that [they] will be coming at problems with a similar set of approaches and a similar set of values."

Unfortunately, this is a luxury a CEO can only afford while his or her company is small. But Crapuchettes stays tapped into a network of business contacts, customers, vendors, and partners, which he will frequently call on to get the scoop on a job candidate. He once discovered from a customer that he had known for years that an applicant was very intelligent, but rested on his intellectual laurels and didn't have a good work ethic.

Once you have the potential employee in the hot seat, here are some characteristics you should look for that make it easier to delegate tasks once they come on board:

• Crapuchettes looks for people who are quick on the uptake, not just for learning to perform tasks, but so that they can internalize the company's mission and vision.
• "Everybody on my team is somebody I might delegate to," says Pratt. Since she often hands out tasks that require cooperation, she looks for hires who are respectful of other people.
• You need an employee who isn't afraid to ask questions, or in a pinch to ask for help, to make delegating a success, says Pratt.
• "I look for people who are independent," says Pratt, but "not like cowboy mentality where they're going to run with something all by themselves off into the fields" ahead of the rest of us. She looks for a person who takes ownership of a task and takes the initiative to make it successful.

Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Hiring Practices

How to Delegate Properly: Communicate Clearly

Delegating requires a lot of thought by the person giving the assignment, in part because you always need to be more explicit than your gut instinct or common sense suggests. Make sure there is no room for error or misinterpretation.
When you meet with the employee to delegate the work you should let them know "here's exactly what I want you to do, here's my expectations, here's how we're going to touch base with each other to make sure you're comfortable doing it and that I'm comfortable with how you're doing it," says Pratt.

You also need to make yourself available for plenty of questions. If you give off the impression that you don't want to be bothered, the person will pick up on that and potentially walk away with an incomplete understanding of the assignment.

Dig Deeper: How to Improve Your Communication Skills

How to Delegate Properly: Getting the Most Out of Part-Time Employees

It's particularly important to communicate clearly with your part-time employees because they have a different mental, emotional, and sometimes physical relationship with your company. Due to her line of work, Pratt employs a lot of part-time people, which can complicate the delegation process. "They're not thinking about my company when they're not billing me," she explains, "so they're not going to step up and think about things that I haven't thought about first."

Unless Pratt tasks them with being creative and makes it part of the job description, her contract employees won't do more or less than what she tells them to explicitly. This lesson can even carry over to your full-time employees. You have to hold in mind how they conceptualize your company. If you keep their personal and professional goals in mind, for example who is looking to expand their skill set, when assigning tasks, you can make them more motivated and potentially get better results because of the enthusiasm they are more likely to bring to tasks they have a proclivity towards.

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How to Delegate Properly: Following Up

Depending on the size of your company and the type of work you do, you will want to check up with the people you've delegated tasks to at different intervals. Pratt recommends a minimum of once a week and Crapuchettes holds to weekly and biweekly meetings with different members of his staff. It's important to remember that these sessions are not opportunities to tamper with all the details of the project but rather to determine if it's more generally headed in the right direction.
Pratt always explains to her employees that the check-ins are not resultant of a lack of trust. She says, "I'm going to be monitoring you, but not because I think you're going to do poor work, [it's because] I want to do everything I can to make sure that you do excellent work."

Dig Deeper: How to Follow Up on Delegation

Resources

• The International Virtual Assistant's Association is a non-profit that both certifies virtual assistants and connects them with prospective employers. This can be a particularly useful resource for solopreneurs.
• Project Leadership Gold is a Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida-based project management consulting firm that advises executives on how to execute projects successfully, including issues such as delegation.

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