Businesses are fragile, especially during the first few months and years of their launch. Most business owners make mistakes, experience setbacks, face loss of profits, and have to find ways to stay afloat while their business struggles to take off. Most of these problems are beyond your control and you just need to find workarounds. However, there’s one disease almost all businesses face that is in your control. It’s called “no one can do it as well as me.”
What is it and does it affect your business?
As the name suggests, this disease is a tendency to take on too much and underestimate your team’s capabilities. It’s quite common for inexperienced business owners to suffer from this disease, but experienced business folk can get impacted too. Most entrepreneurs develop this over the first few months and years of the business because they want to be in control and ensure everything is perfect.
Unfortunately, this disease has consequences that can lead to the downfall of your business; it can have a negative impact on your health has well. Entrepreneurs who refuse to delegate are more likely to make mistakes, experience frequent delays, and burnout because of the excess workload.
These entrepreneurs also end up valuing money more than their time and take on tasks that they shouldn’t be. Fear of delegation and a lack of trust in your team can stifle your growing business and compromise your chances of success.
How to overcome it?
This disease is a force of habit and isn’t as difficult to control and eliminate as most people believe it to be. Entrepreneurs who understand this weakness and attempt to eliminate it struggle to find the right balance between delegation and comfort because they don’t have the right plan. Here are five tips that will help you overcome this habit and ensure your business runs as smoothly as possible.
#1 Determine what you can delegate
The first step is to determine what you can and cannot delegate. Look over all the tasks that you are scheduled to complete over the course of a week or a month and create a list of them. When you have the complete list, consider the tasks and ask yourself, “What can I easily delegate?”
Most entrepreneurs tend to first delegate tasks they don’t enjoy and which require less skill because they’re the easiest to delegate. They also choose tasks that are less critical, and ones that won’t have much of an impact on the business if they aren’t done properly. But these aren’t the only tasks you should delegate.
If there is someone on your team that can handle a certain task better than you, it’s a good idea to delegate it to them. Look at the list of items on your schedule and consider the members of your team carefully to determine who the best choice for the job would be.
#2 Consider the tasks that require more skill and are more important
Most entrepreneurs struggle to delegate these tasks and that can have an impact on their business as well as their team. If you only assign simple and unimportant jobs to your team, they’ll eventually realise that you don’t trust them and that can affect their morale and enthusiasm levels.
Instead of handling all the important tasks yourself, you should create a system that supports your employees and helps them perform these tasks. Train them and set up KPIs to keep track of their performance. That’ll ensure they’re more capable of handling difficult and important tasks. If you want your business to succeed, you need to trust your team & let them handle important jobs as well.
#3 Set up KPI at every level
Entrepreneurs hesitate to delegate tasks because they don’t know if their team can handle them efficiently. KPIs and feedback systems can help you keep track of your team’s performance and ease your burden. This will help you monitor your team’s performance on a regular basis and provide comprehensive feedback. You can assess this performance and provide your team members feedback, to help them improve.
If you have a good KPI and feedback system in place, you won’t spend time worrying about your team’s performance and whether they did the job properly. The KPIs will provide all the information you need and you can use this information to improve performance, teamwork, and make your business more productive. You can hire someone to keep an eye on the KPIs and provide regular reports.
#4 Invest in training
The KPI system should work in conjunction with an ongoing training system. It’s not enough to provide feedback and point out mistakes your employees might have made. You need to help them improve and learn how to get the job done efficiently. That can only happen if you have an on-going training system in place.
Many business owners hesitate to invest in training because they fear their employees would leave post the training phase. While that is likely to happen, would you rather leave them untrained and inefficient? Poorly-trained employees will have very low productivity levels and can’t contribute towards your company’s growth. Your employees also need to be retrained in order to keep their skills sharp. This is often referred to as recurrency training and it helps improve the overall performance of your team.
#5 Include innovation
Modern technology has evolved considerably over the last few decades and there are a number of tools that can minimise the margin of error. You can use innovation to get more reliable performance from your team. All you need to do is provide them with the proper tools like software, hardware, and communications systems to help them work efficiently.
These tools will help your company provide better employee support, better customer service, and ensure your business runs productively and seamlessly. You can use tools like marketing software, CRM, sales tracking software, etc.
Delegation isn’t the same as abdication; you need to keep this in mind when you delegate tasks to your team or outsource them. As a business owner, you’re responsible for everything that happens in your company so you need to help your team to get the job done properly.
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
