The following is describes the only way to possibly grow your company. The “doing” is very straight forward. Everyone knows they need to work hard, plan and delegate. The stick is “when” and “how much”. Knowing that will keep the company growing gracefully most of the time.
From just about any startup or management book, we know the following is involved:
1. Skilled labor
2. Planning
3. Delegation
Skilled Labor
Remember spending all day learning about and practicing your professional skill? It gave you excitement to think about doing it so well for your company. Now you are doing it all day, but it doesn’t seem the same as what you dreamed. You are under pressure and stressed. That’s ok. It’s a stage you are about to get out of.
It’s difficult for you to focus on your skill right now, so let’s first talk about something that’s needed so you can calmly concentrate on your skilled labor. Staring at a pile of tasks? That will kill your productivity. They need to be broken down and planed for.
The Plan
Planning takes a little thought, and a little time. It’s fairly straight forward. Weigh your tasks (in your head mostly) on the following categories: cost, value, time, difficulty. For example, if the task is very easy to do, costs almost nothing, and offers great value, it goes right to the top. If a task is high value, expensive, but not very difficult to do (becoming BBB accredited) then weigh the task accordingly. For all those achievers, check out the Wiegers Weighting spreadsheet.
Next of course is to break down the tasks into segments. Break your tasks up into these categories:
- Now
- This week
- This month
So, let’s say you have done all this but you can’t get anything on your lists done. The weeks and days are always full of tasks, and the months, forget about it! Lucky you! Being so busy with menial tasks is the perfect indicator that you can probably safely hire.
Delegation..no...Delegation Engineering
The traditional term “delegation” doesn’t cut it. Authorize someone to do some tasks? Geez. That part takes 10 seconds. “Ok, do it, here’s the login” or whatever. What happens before and after delegation is what matters.
Engineering the next role to delegate is a long processes that justifies a little work each week. Do it right by having a role defined before you hire the new me ember, and make sure their tasks are somewhat documented. If an employee or contractor steps in and already has good knowledge of their work (through knowledge standardization and/or training) knows what to do (straight forward for low skill work), you have made huge advances for your company if you got the right person on board.
If you can't document it, and simplify the work, you must then hand it to someone that is competent and goal oriented enough to do that part for you. THEN they need the authority to to accomplish it. Tricky sometimes.
Now, here are some clues that it's time to delegate:
- Your budget almost allows for it, and the company needs it
- You can’t seem to catch up with your tasks to properly support current business
- You know how to define the work process, and/or hire for it
Back to skilled labor
You have already been doing this? Great! Now you know something the rest of us learned the hard way. You know that having a great trigger for delegation allows us to keep a clean plan. Since our work load has been minimized we have more time to focus on what we love to do. The tasks are melting away from our plans now, and we are running out of things to do! It’s magical to sick back and have time to work at this company with excellence, since we are now longer stressed about our ever growing task backlog.
What’s next? Well, on a weekly basis we have our company strategy meetings where we go over our 5 year goals, and constantly adjust things. Doing this keeps the backlog full with optional company-growing tasks.
