It is perhaps tougher to be the boss of a small family business than it is to be CEO of a massive corporation. The personal stakes are higher and the day to day emotional interaction with colleagues – family members or otherwise – is more intimate and personal. The fulfilment of a job well done or of helping to develop the skills and career of an employee from your close local community may feel great, but it can also be much tougher to deal with issues like discipline or lay-offs.
One such issue is the concept of delegating. Delegating is a vital, learnable skill in a boss’s repertoire, and doing it properly can actually boost a business’s revenue by around 33%. But passing tasks on to your colleagues in a small home business often feels uncomfortable.
Either you don’t want to burden folk with work that you normally take responsibility for – or you fear that they won’t complete it to the standard that you require. Hesitation like this is why 85% of managers feel they should delegate more.
Revenue boost aside, delegating can help free up vital time and mind space for you to make better decisions. It gets mundane, repetitive tasks off your hands, freeing you to do work that only you can do to expand the prospects of the business. If you’re constantly behind on your most important tasks, you need to delegate more.
Learning to delegate will also help you to develop your staff’s skills, preventing them from becoming unfulfilled and enabling them to improve their own prospects. People power is one of the key values of the home business sector. When you own a small business, there is nothing more valuable than looking out for the needs, feelings, and potential of those around you in your local community.
So how can you go from being a notorious responsibility-hog to trusting those in your employ to take a few tasks off your hands?
The first point is that, like anything else in your business, you should approach delegating in an organized way. Of course, it is in the nature of delegating that you will sometimes need to delegate at short notice. The idea is that this becomes much more viable when you are organized to begin with.
Take a look at the tasks you do on a daily basis. Not just the ones that you’re supposed to do, but everything that ends up taking your time during a working day. Rank them in order of importance and figure out which ones could be delegated. Not just those of which your employees are capable – but those which they might be trained up to do, too.
Call a meeting to discuss your new approach to delegating. State outright that you plan to do something and you become more likely to do so. Make that commitment in front of your crew and you will become accountable for seeing it through.
But also use this meeting to discuss the new balance of the workload with the team. It may be reasonable for them to feel that they are not paid enough or trained enough to deal with some of the tasks you wish to offload on them. That extra training or pay raise might be worth the investment.
Or they might offer to go further than you dared suggest. Perhaps they’ve been secretly waiting for the chance to take on more responsibility and learn new skills.
Whatever the outcome of the meeting, no shift in workload like this should take place without factoring further meetings for mutual feedback. At these meetings you’ll want to check that the team have been comfortable and capable at their new tasks, and with the amount of work involved.
It’s also your way of holding yourself accountable for fulfilling the extra delegating you promised. Even after committing to delegating work, home business bosses often relent and continue to try to do it all themselves.
Naturally, as it is your business, you will be very concerned to ensure that quality levels are maintained when you pass work down the line. It is important to recognize your own ‘self-enhancement bias’ when assessing work that others have done. Self-enhancement bias is the very commonly held assumption that one’s own accomplishments outshine what others are capable of.
Try to assess the work of others objectively, and be constructive in your feedback rather than fixing problems for them. Collaboration can be a great path towards delegation. “Tell me and I forget,” as Benjamin Franklin. “Tech me and I remember; Involve me and I learn.”
This new visual guide to learning to delegate more is a fantastic prompt to start distributing work more effectively around your home business. Get started this week to boost revenue, morale, and the all-round value you offer your crew and they offer you in return.
