As a business owner, it will often feel easier to do everything yourself. Showing someone else how to do it for you, and then picking up the pieces when they don’t do it up to your standard, can be a frustrating experience.
Knowing why, when, and how to delegate is one of the most valuable skills a leader can master.
In the short term (and in the opening stages of your business) you may well be doing pretty much everything. But when your workload increases, trying to juggle all the responsibilities at once will quickly lead to the business’ results suffering – and you risking burnout.
As a leader, your time is precious. What do you consider your hourly rate to be? If you’re spending hours a day doing something that you could pay someone to do as well as (or better than you) for less money, then you’re missing out on a valuable return.
STAGE #1: Your Business Breakdown
The first step to successful delegation is to create an overview of all the tasks that need to happen for your business to run successfully.
Replay a typical week in your business in your mind. What do you do? What are your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly responsibilities? Take your time here – come back and add items that you’ve missed. Don’t leave anything out!
STAGE #2: The Impact Doability Matrix
Now you’ve listed all the tasks you complete as a leader, you’ll have a good overview of how you spend your time.
The Impact Doability Matrix is a tool to help you decide what to do with each of the tasks on the list that you created in Stage #1. The options are:
- Do it yourself
- Delegate intelligently
- Drop
To decide which of these three categories to put each task into, ask yourself:
- How hard is this for me to do? (Doability)
- How big a positive impact will it have on the strategic goals of the business? (this is almost always the impact on the ultimate bottom line in the long term).
Here’s the impact doability matrix: it’s simple, but powerful.
Here are each of the four quadrants broken down in turn.
High impact, high doability
Get these tasks done first – they’re the ‘easy wins’ that make a big difference to the bottom line. The further along your business is, the less full this box is likely to be. If you have the resource and someone can do these tasks as well as or better than you, delegate them.
High impact, low doability
Tasks in this box are often more complex, with longer term effects. They can be high reward, but also carry a decent amount of risk. You’ll need to make a call about whether or when to get these done, based on your resources (time, money, available staff). Make sure not to overlook these just because they’re difficult. If they’re going to have significant long-term impact, they’re ‘big rocks’, worth doing. Break them down into bitesize steps if they feel overwhelming. You’ll often find that these are tasks you may have to do yourself. But if they’re low doability because they’re outside your particular skillset, or because you plain don’t like doing them, then delegate if you can.
Low impact, high doability
Tasks in this box are often pieces of a bigger picture, technical tasks, and/or tasks that can make your operations run more smoothly. Even though they’re easy, don’t use getting them done as an excuse not to address the higher impact tasks on your list. You can almost always delegate these tasks. Doing so will also help build positivity and motivation in your staff team.
Low impact, low doability
Tasks that fall into this box should be dropped. They’re often jobs that you’ve got into the habit of doing, without really assessing their effectiveness. Dropping these tasks may be harder than you think if you’re using them as a crutch to stay busy for the sake of being busy – and avoiding the more impactful (and often scarier) tasks that need doing. You may not be able to stop all the tasks on your ‘drop’ list immediately; despite being ineffective in the grand scheme of things, they can have their place in the business, and be a habitual way of getting things done. In these cases, you’ll need to manage the task out gradually, slowly introducing an alternative way of doing things.
STAGE #3: Do, delegate, or drop
As you go through and plot your list of tasks onto the matrix, write down whether you’ll do them yourself, delegate them, or drop them.
At the end of the exercise, you should be left with three separate lists:
- Tasks to do yourself
- Tasks to delegate to others
- Tasks to drop entirely
Once you have these three lists finalised, the next step is to move onto clearly defining tasks and responsibilities for both yourself and your team. You need to make sure that everyone involved is clear on their performance objectives; and has the information, support, and time to get the job done to the required standard. We’ll cover these in next week’s blog.
Want to streamline your business and give your team clarity – but don’t know where to start?