One of the toughest lessons any owner manager has to learn is how to delegate. When you set up your own business it is one of the most important things that you will learn.

There is much said about the benefits of delegation but if you get it wrong it can be disastrous.

Growing and creating something from scratch can be incredibly rewarding but it is all too easy for the process to become all consuming. There is something very personal about building a business, in some cases it almost becomes an extension of the individual.

No one will care more about the welfare and future of the business than the person who created it in the first place, but that can lead to problems. There is a real temptation for owner managers of small operations to control every aspect of the company, leading to trouble in the long term and restricting the growth and potential of the business.

In reality even the best business leaders cannot do everything for themselves, and a failure to delegate will eventually dilute your impact on the business as a whole.

The more a company grows and expands then the more important it becomes to delegate. The best businessmen and women are those who can take a step back and take a strategic, holistic view rather than allowing themselves to get bogged down in day to day minutiae.

There is far more to good delegation than merely deciding which people should do which tasks. It goes without saying that you have to have the right people in the right place before you can even begin to think about delegating.

As a business grows and expands one of the key tasks of an owner manager is ensuring they have the right mix of skills and experience on board.

Delegating does not have to mean hands off the entire project. As a small business owner you retain full responsibly for the outcome no matter who you delegate to. Keep the lines of communication open and set milestones and timelines for a project. As your employees prove themselves to be efficient and competent you can give them more responsibly but trust is earned.

Of course, not everyone is perfect and mistakes will be made along the way, the key is not to concentrate on those mistakes. If you want a creative workplace where your staff are willing to try things for themselves then the last thing you need is a blame culture.

If people are worried that they are going to be criticised for every minor mistake then they will simply stop trying to do things for themselves and will wait to be told what to do.

Learning to delegate successfully can be a real challenge but the results will be well worth all the effort.

Do

• Take time to explain the task fully and clearly
• Allow your employee the opportunity to ask questions and add their thoughts.
• Follow up the conversation in writing with agreed timelines.
• Take time to check on how things are going and ask if they need any help.
• Resist the temptation to do it yourself because it would be quicker, in the long run it will free up much more of your time if you can delegate tasks.

Don’t

• Delegate, don’t dump. Before giving an employee a potentially big task, ask them about their current workload and capacity to take on more.
• Ditch criticism in front of others – at the end of the project conduct a debrief to see what went well and what could have been improved.
• Don’t delegate and then pull someone off the task to do something else unless it’s absolutely necessary – give people the time to shine and do the task well.
• Ditch the temptation to do it yourself because it would be quicker, you will free up much more of your time if you can delegate tasks successfully.
• Delegate but don’t abdicate responsibility, stay close to the business and keep your figure on the pulse.

Hire the right people, make sure they have the right training and skills to succeed and work with them until they can fly solo on certain projects. Keep the lines of communication open and give feedback in a timely and respectful manner. Once you learn the art of effective delegation it will free up more of your time to work on the business, not in the business, and can take the company to a new level of success.