Elements of Success: Step 7: Delegate

You want your business to achieve remarkable accomplishments, right? Then you must learn to take John Maxwell’s advice: “If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.”

You can’t do everything yourself, and you shouldn’t have to. Delegation means that you take tasks that used to be your responsibility and assign them to others. You also empower them to carry out those jobs. Learn more about the concept of delegation in the video “Richard Branson’s A to Z of Business: D is for Delegation.”

The Benefits of Delegation

Distributing the workload among your team members keeps you from being buried in tasks. Effective delegation can lower your stress level and keep you from putting in so many long nights.

But don’t think that delegation is only for your own good. It is beneficial to the company as a whole and to individual employees.

The Importance of Skills Matching

Your team is likely comprised of people with different strengths. A delegation will be most successful if you pull back from jobs that don’t play to your strengths and assign those tasks to people who do excel in those areas. When you are willing to delegate responsibilities, you can divide up the workload based on which team member is best suited for a task.

Coaching Opportunities

When you give tasks to others on your team, you provide chances for them to refine their business skills. Although you must empower and release them to carry out the delegated tasks, you don’t have to step out of the picture entirely. By maintaining a presence and an open line of communication as your employees work, you will have the opportunity to provide helpful coaching that will develop and refine their skills.

Tips for Follow-up

Successful delegation is more than just handing out jobs. The process will be most effective if you:

• Give feedback. Evaluate your employee’s job performance and share your findings with them. Point out areas of both strength and weakness.
• Ask for feedback. Be open to hearing your employees’ thoughts on how you are doing at delegating and empowering them.
• Keep delegation in mind for future hires. When considering new team members, choose people who will be able to handle responsibility. Look for people whose strengths complement yours rather than people who are just like you.

Stay tuned for the next installment in our 10 Elements of Success series when we will talk about Focus.

For the previous installment in the series please see Be Organized.