Mastering Delegation: A Practical Guide for Leaders

1. Mastering Delegation: Tasks vs. Responsibilities: Hello and welcome. I'm Rebecca heartbeat. See, management consultant, coffee drinker, and advisor to small businesses. I have been an employer. I have been an employee. I now consult with small growing businesses in all of this has always entailed a lot of delegation. In this course, you will learn a simple and effective way to delegate your work. You will learn why delegation can be so challenging as well as of course, how to overcome those challenges. You will learn how to determine which work you should be delegating to somebody else, how to delegate that work and how to communicate that delegation to the people to whom you are delegating. You'll also learn why and how delegation doesn't just free up your time, but actually makes your business more productive, more successful, and more innovative. By the time you're done with the course, you will be ready to build your own delegation plan for your business starting right away. This course is for the new business manager or the small business manager, or the new manager, the manager of a growing team, the CEO of the business, and so on in the course of understanding what to delegate and how you will also be determining what is required for your business to be successful. What is the most important work and how do you make sure that it is happening? The result will be increased productivity as well as a happier and more motivated team. By delegating and the system used in this course, you will be showing your employees that you trust them, you believe in them, and you know that they are not only doing good work, but will continuously improve as well as a final project, you'll be building a delegation plan for your business. As a business owner, manager, or leader, your primary responsibility is a productive and happy team of workers. And that doesn't just happen by showing up. That happens with structure and planning. This delegation course will give you exactly what you need. So are you ready to increase your team's success rate? Let's get started. 2. What is delegation?: Let's start with some basics, but essentials. Let's define delegation. Delegation is getting other people to do your work, right? Yes, this is correct. But also no. Yes. Because delegation means taking something that you do and having somebody else do it. But no, because it's not that simple. It's not just a handover that happens with a single sentence of Instruction, at least not proper long-term delegation. This course is about delegation at work. A manager, a leader, or even a colleague, reassigning particular work to different individuals. That is not about tasks. It is all about responsibility. Delegation is sharing responsibility. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by delegation means sharing responsibility. The book management describes delegation as the assignment of authority to another person, normally from a manager to a subordinate to carry out specific activities. The most important word in that sentence is authority. When you delegate work to another person, you are giving them authority to act on your behalf, however small or big, the task is, that means that you are handing over something important, responsibility, power, ownership. You may still be ultimately accountable for the task, but you're trusting somebody else to get it done in the way that you want it done. Delegation is about giving somebody else the opportunity, the ability, and the responsibility for getting the work done. So delegation isn't about sharing tasks, it's about sharing responsibility. So you don't have to do it all yourself. In conclusion, delegation is the disbursement of responsibility for achieving success. 3. The Delegation Dilemma: Why It’s Tough to Let Go: Why is delegations so hard to do? Is delegation even that difficult? I mean, you just tell people to do things and then they do them and you are off the hook, right? Everything is done exactly the way you wanted one you wanted, and with the result that you wanted, It's simple. Well, maybe not that simple. Any business owner or leader or manager who has tried to delegate work as they're hiring new people, knows that this is never how it goes. You decide what to delegate, you tell somebody what to do and how to do it. And when you come back to check on them later, it's not at all how you wanted it done. So you just do it yourself. It's so much quicker and delegation ends up not happening at all, because delegation is actually more complex than it initially seems. The biggest challenges to delegation are people not doing the thing the way you wanted them to have an expectation of how this should be done. Either because you've always done it that way or that's how you've always pictured it. Then when they're doing it, it looks different and you're not happy with that. There's the fear of losing control. If you're giving away this work, are you giving away control over the work, over decisions, over the future of the business, over how things get done. That's a hard thing to do. There's also the fear of losing importance. If you're giving work to somebody else. Does that mean that you are doing less work and therefore are less important to the business. Does the business needs you less? Does it show that maybe you were never that important all along because you could just divvy out your tasks to other people. This of course is not the case, but it feels that way very often. Another challenge is not wanting to impose. Delegation can be hard because you look around and see people who are already doing work and it feels like you're just piling them with more work. And finally, it can take too long to explain. And of course then once it's done, it's not done the way you expected it to be done. And so of course it's faster to just do it yourself. These are the five biggest challenges that people face when trying to delegate. And in this course, we will discuss how to counteract each of these challenges. That will be our starting point. For now, I want you to think of your past or current delegation challenges and be honest with yourself, many of these challenges are manifesting themselves to you right now. Have any of these thoughts ever crossed your mind, even just for a moment when you're thinking about delegation. Take a few minutes for some introspection and think about when you yourself have been confronted with these specific challenges and write it down for yourself. It's helpful to start by recognizing the specific obstacles that you will have to overcome in learning how to delegate effectively. 4. Why delegation is important: But why is delegation important? Why with all these challenges, is it worth spending time on? Most simply? Because you cannot do it all? You must accept that not everything in your business can be run, managed, and executed by a single person. And that single person being you, the better you are at your job, the more people will expect from you, and the more your business grows, the less of it you can do on your own. And the truth is, it's not just that you can't do it all. You also shouldn't do it all. You should do the parts that you are really good at. The parts where your skills are on best display and where you're getting the best results. And yes, you could learn the other parts and do a mediocre job, maybe even a possible job. But mediocre and possible or not, your greatest aspiration, or are they the right use of your time? Whether you hire employees, whether you outsource everything to agencies or do a bit of both. Delegation is a requirement. Every time you hire somebody, whether in house or outsource, you will be delegation work that you used to do to somebody else. This is probably true from day one. There is work that you most likely delegate already. It may be your legal work, it might be your bookkeeping. It might mean that you use a scheduling software for your meetings. Perhaps you order business cards from a printing service. All of these are examples of delegation. Does your work increases and you yourself want to be able to specialize more and more in the areas where you bring the most value, you will have to continue delegation. But there are a lot of benefits to delegation. It's not just about freeing up your time and getting things done. Good delegation is valuable to you as an individual on multiple levels. It is valuable to your business as a whole, and it is valuable to the employees that you have or the employees that you will hire. Let's take a moment to look at exactly how delegation adds value in all these areas. The more you understand that and the more you can keep that in mind, the more successful you will be in your delegation efforts. How does delegation bring value to you individually, are personally. Well, obviously you will get more done if there are more hands doing things than more things can get done. But it's not just about that. You will also have less on your mind. You will have fewer things that you have to think about in my new shift, which means that you have more attention and energy to give to other areas of business, which will result in better and easier decision-making. And of course, it means that you use your efforts for what you do best when you're using the best person for the job, that's when you get the best results. But of course, delegation is more than that. It's also valuable to your business. Overall. One reason is a continuation of what we just said. If you are using your time and effort for the work you do best, it means that the same is true of everybody else who works with you. So you're always going to have the right person for that given job, the best person for that given job. With different delegation methods, you can take advantage of economies of scale by using resources and services that can offer you these advantages. It also means that your business finds newer and better ways of doing things by delegating work to people and tools that are best place to do that work. It helps you stay innovative. I also said that delegation is valuable for your employees. The first thing it does is offer them professional development, training and skills. It teaches them to do things, whether that's a completely new thing or a different way of doing something they already knew. Delegating to your employees allows them to develop skills that they want to develop. Our lucrative for them to develop. It will also build trust with your team, which ultimately makes them more loyal to your business. You're showing them that you trust them with this authority, with this responsibility. And so it strengthens the relationship that you have with them. And it urges them to think critically when you introduce them to something new or have them work on something in addition to what they're doing or in place of what they're doing. They're going to bring a new perspective to that. And they're going to look at the best way to do it. Why are they doing this? What does it mean that you trust them to do it? And you will naturally be developing their critical thinking skills. In conclusion, getting more done might be the most obvious or immediate perk of delegation, but it's only one of many perks start delegating today, the real long-term value that you get from delegation is business, personal, and professional growth. 5. When is it time to delegate?: One is the correct moment for you to delegate work and how do you recognize it when it happens? Most people connect delegation to the idea of saving time. But really, delegation is about much more than just saving time. Delegation is really about efficacy. Delegation as a way to be more effective in our work. Too often, we think of delegation as a consequence of too much work. But what if, instead of the consequence of a problem, we made it a cause for improvement. We are flipping this definition around and treating delegation as that opportunity rather than just a way to put out a fire. Once we see delegation as an opportunity for improvement, that it changes our whole approach. Now we want to delegate. Now we see that it is in our interests because it is a natural improvement. Over the next few lectures, we will look at some of the classic triggers for delegation and how to treat these as opportunities rather than problems. 6. Lack of time: Let's start with the most classic reason for delegation and that is lack of time. It is simply not realistic for you to do everything that you're trying to get done. And there are two important factors when you deal with delegation due to lack of time. Those factors are efficiency and preparation of all the things that you're doing. You want to delegate the ones that you do the least efficiently. You can not be an expert practitioner in all the things. So the first step is to examine what you do. The worst. By worst, I mean, it takes you longer than it should take you, and you're not doing it to the same level of quality as you should and could be doing. Efficiency is about finding the things that you do badly and that you know, somebody else would do better than you, so that you are doing the things that you do best. But preparation is also key and it has to come first. The standard workweek is 40 h, and frankly, 40 h should be enough. We will use 40 h as our benchmark here. If foresee hours denotes a full workweek, then the correct moment to decide to delegate is not when you're working at 50 or 60 h a week. It's one, you start to get over 30, closer to 35 h a week. That's right. The correct moment to consider delegation is before you are at maximum capacity. Why is that? Why not wait to get to capacity and realize, Okay, I don't have time anymore. Well, it's for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it will take you time to delegate. So if you're working at 35 h a week, the first couple of weeks in which you're delegating, you'll be training, explaining that will easily take you up to 40. But it's also because you always must allow for the unpredictable. If something happens, you need to put out a fire or a new opportunity arises. You want to have that window of time that you can dedicate to that get into the habit of noticing when you are approaching capacity before you get there to find those opportunities for delegation. 7. Lack of interest: Another important moment in which to delegate is when you have lost interest in the work. Have you ever been in the shower and suddenly you forget whether or not you washed your hair or maybe you're driving a daily commute home. And once you arrive, you realize you don't remember most of the drive. The things that we do every day eventually become second nature. We stopped thinking about them. We just do them. This can be useful in chores, but it is damaging at work. The moment that work becomes rote, boring or overly predictable is the moment to delegate. If you can do a job without even thinking about it, then you are doing a job without thinking about it. And you want every part of your business to be planned and executed with proper thought. Once you're past that point, it's time to delegate that work to somebody else for whom it will be new and exciting and who might even find a new and better way to do it. Don't stay stuck in predictable or boring work. That is the moment at which you must delegate. 8. Lack of skill: When you are confronted with lack of skill, it's time to delegate. There are certain things that you are good at doing. There are other things that you do, okay? Some things you're just bad at doing. We're always happy to continue doing the things that we're good or great at when we find something that we do. So, So our natural response is often to say, well I can get better. I mean, I'm smart, I'm able, I'm good at learning. I can learn this thing. But let's say that you are average at a certain task. You can work on it. You can get better and get to the point of being above average. That's pretty good, right? Above average is above the norm. And yet, look at how far you still are from being excellent, let alone outstanding. And you've spent all this time trying to improve that thing just to get to the above-average stage. That's all time that you could have spent on areas where you are. Excellent. Think of how much you would have gotten done in that case. You just have to accept that you won't learn at all. And that's okay. Aspire to excellence and spend your energy and time on the things that get you there. You can always learn more and you can always improve. But it's still okay to be selective about the areas that you want to improve. The rest, you must delegate. 9. For a new opportunity: Not all reasons for delegation or because of a problem, a lack of something. Another great reason for delegation is a new opportunity that has entered your work-life. Change happens in business change happens a lot. It could be any sort of new opportunity, a new partnership, a new clients and new employee. It might also be a new competitor or a new legislation or compliance requirements, or unnatural or economic event. Whatever causes the change, good or bad, predictable, unpredictable, that change will require a shift in your attention, which means a shift in the work you do and how you're spending your time. It's time to delegate. One in that situation, you want to, first of all, determine how you have to spend your time and your abilities going forward. Given this new change, what will your work day and work life look like? After that? Write down how you're spending your time now. So pre change. Then I want you to take these two lists and set them side-by-side like this. And you can start to determine how much time do you have to free up which of the old work that you're doing now makes the most sense for you to continue given your new role. Whatever is leftover, that is what you must delegate. 10. When training: And finally, another reason to delegate that might have almost nothing to do with you is the opportunity to uplift the members of your team. You hired people because you have a business to run and you need people to do the things. Now that those people work for you, you are responsible for their professional well-being. Of the five perks that employee is asked for the most, two of those perks are challenging work and professional development. The best way to offer both of these is through delegation. Don't try to invent new things for your employees to do. Start by looking at what has to get done or what should be getting done in your business. And then assign those jobs to the right people. Find the areas where you and they believe that they can perform at a level of very good or excellent and offer them whatever trading they need to get their delegation is an important step in employee development and happiness. Just another area where delegation makes everybody's life better. 11. What to delegate: But how do you decide what you're going to delegate? It seems like this is an essential part in your delegation journey. You have to make sure you're delegating the correct things. Here's how not to do it. Create a list of all the tasks that are happening. Randomly selected, safe 30% of those tasks. Then give them onto the next person and say do these things with everything you have learned so far. Why you should delegate, recognizing one to delegate overcoming challenges. You know that choosing what to delegate is a much more deliberate and important job than this. Choosing the right things to delegate is the difference between success and your business and inefficiencies At best, major problems at worst. Now the first step in delegation is always to decide what role you want to play in your business. We've talked already about noticing where you have a lack of skill or a lack of interest. And that's all relevant. But let's stop looking at what you don't want to do and look at what you do want to do. What is the role that you will play? Will you be client-facing? Will you be operational? Are you generating business? Are you serving clients? Are you making all of the management decisions? Are you in charge of training people and so on and so forth. How do you want your day to day to be spent at your work? Here are two important considerations for determining what role you want to play. The first one is, what do you enjoy doing? The things that you enjoy doing or things you want to keep doing and do more of. You have to like what you do every day with your life. So choosing what you enjoy is a pretty solid starting point. But also look at what has brought you the best results so far. This is where you might notice things that you didn't know you enjoy doing or maybe even thought you actively didn't enjoy doing. But you actually realize you're quite good at. There is something there that motivates you. And the truth is you will enjoy doing the things that you're good at doing. These two questions should determine what role you choose to play in your business. Here are some additional questions to help you get through this brainstorming. All of this, by the way, is on the worksheet that's associated with this lesson. So you can work through this for yourself. Consider what are some of your unique skills are. So what are some of the unique insights that you bring to the workplace? You also want to talk about the things you're just not very good at doing. Those areas where you really lack the skill or expertise or attention to detail required. Similarly, what do you not enjoy? What bores you? What frustrates you? What do you dread every time you have to do it? Be honest about where you are not being efficient, where you are finding the longest or most roundabout way to do things. And maybe that's how you do it because it's the only way you know, how are the only way you feel comfortable. But if there's a better way to do it, maybe you should stop doing it. And of course, where you're not proficient, as we've said before, work on the things that you are best at doing, finalizing what your role will be at work, and which parts of your work will be reassigned to other roles. That's right. Start by thinking about the roles rather than the people. Don't say, I don't like this marketing part of my work and so I'm gonna give it to Jenny rather say, if my role doesn't include marketing, which role in my business should include marketing? Every time you delegate, I want you to think in terms of roles. What is the role that should be doing this and what are the responsibilities of that role? And with all that in mind, what will the person who feels this role have to get done? Whether it is the first time that you're delegating to somebody new or you've been through this whole process before. Always come back to what is your role in the business. Always make sure that when you're delegating work, you have first to define the new or improved role of the person from whom the work is being delegated. 12. Workflow Optimization: Delegate, Automate, Outsource, Stop: There is an additional step to consider and your delegation journey. That is that not everything has to be delegated to employees. You can also automate work. You can outsource it. And the most fun of all, you can just stop doing it even when you choose these other options, the rules in this course still apply. Let's take a quick but closer look at these to help you in your decision-making. Option one, you can delegate the work. To do this. You want to check your bench strength. In other words, look at the people you have in your team. What skills do you have available and what skills can you effectively further develop? You also want to consider what are some things that you have to keep in house that have to be done by people employed by your business, either for confidentiality reasons, proprietary reasons, or other. That's the work that you choose to delegate. But you can also choose to automate some work. The higher the volume of repetitive tasks than the more you want to consider automating that work. There are software options for all sorts of different things. Find out what's out there and whether it's going to help in your business. You want to apply the same consideration to picking an outsourcing tool or software as you do to delegation, which is, this is the correct solution for you. If it offers the results that you need. It's not about the features of the software. It's about what it allows you to do, much like with delegating, start with what is the desired outcome, and then determine if that automating solution will give you that outcome. You can also outsource work, move it to the experts. There are firms, are agencies that will outsource all parts of what you have to do when a business, this could be everything from your legal work, you're counting work, your taxes to admin work or answering phones and much more. The two things you want to consider when determining what to outsource and to whom our subject matter expertise. We're particular licenses are required, such as width legal work or accounting work. And you don't have those licenses in house, you outsource. The other consideration is economies of scale. This is where things like admin work or HR benefits or even postal services can benefit from outsourcing. You get to take advantage of somebody else's economies of scale. And finally, there are things that you can just stop doing. Is this task really necessary? Determining what you can stop doing might be best done out loud. It can be hard to let go of things, not least because if you stopped doing it, you have to ask yourself, why have I done it this long? So sometimes it's easier to walk through those considerations out loud with somebody else. But when you do, you will almost always find that there are some things that you can just stop doing. The ultimate question is, does this task or this project add value? If you think it does, then how is it advancing your company's mission and your company's needs? And if you can't answer those questions, might be time to just stop doing it. 13. How to delegate: start at the end: We're ready to look at how to do your delegation in this one-step, starting at the end, is essential to your delegation success. If you only learn one thing in this entire course, let it be this that delegation starts with understanding the desired outcome. It begins at the end. It begins with the question, what does success look like? If I could only teach you the one thing with this whole course, it would be to answer this question. What does success look like? Describe this to the person to whom you're delegation. When you delegate work, the single most important thing you can share is that success, outcome. That's more important than how to do the work or even what exactly the work is. It's just what makes it successful. Answering this question is the difference between telling somebody to do a thing and delegating responsibility. It's the difference between a quick fix and long-term success. At this point in the course, we've studied your work landscape. We have dealt with all the challenges and all the obstacles, and we've decided what it is that you want to delegate. The next and most important step is to describe the success of this work. Determine what result you want the person to achieve, and then think backwards about how they might do it. Let's walk you through this exercise of starting at the end. We will use social media posting as an example to walk through this. So in our example, the work that is being delegation is posting to social media. Here are the questions that you must answer to properly describe the success of the work. First of all, what is the work? Begin with a brief and broad description of what the job is. In shorts. In our case, the job would be posting to social media. That's it. Next, describe why it is important following this course, you've already reviewed what it is that you want to automate, outsource and stopped doing this work, made the cut through to delegation. Then you already know why it is important to the business. Now you get to describe how this work contributes to the success of the business. Using our example of social media posting, you might determine that posting to social media is important because your clients are active on social media. It's where they do their research or their shopping, or it's where they go to learn. Posting on social media might allow you to interact with them and to start to build a relationship. And social media perhaps gives you a voice to explain your brand or your point of view. All of these things can contribute to the success of the business. Next, we must describe how you know that it is being successful. Is that success outcome? The point is to describe the effect of that success to make sure that you are talking about the outcomes and not the tasks. A simpler way to approach this is to explain what has changed in the business. Describe what you'll be able to see or hear or do because this job is successful. Things that you would not see or hear or do before. In our example of posting to social media, we might talk about things like clicks to various landing pages, time onsite by the people coming from those likes, or rate of conversion by the people coming from those likes. You might look at interaction with the brand. Things like people leaving comments or answering questions, or sharing your posts or your content that bring you a new audience that will also visit your website. You might want to see an increase in tags of your brand or mentions of your brand outside of your posts. These are all visible and measurable success criteria. And finally, describe what the job entails based on everything that we have written out so far, you can describe the essentials of the job. You want to describe what it entails using the information you've developed so far. Sticking with our example, if the goal with social media posting is more clicks and more interaction, then it's not enough to say that the job entails posting to social media. But it actually entails is posting engaging content, encouraging clicks or comments or likes. Sharing links to landing pages are shopping pages and engaging with viewers to nurture a conversation and more. The way you share this information with the person to whom you're delegating might look something like this. We want you to post to social media because it enhances our brand recognition. We do this because we want to see increased sales, increased interaction with our posts, and regular growth of followers. We will be measuring success through likes, shares and clicks to landing pages, as well as time on site and conversion rates. To achieve this, I recommend that you create posts that ask questions and encouraged clicking through to an enticing offer and make our audience wants to come back from war. Find out what our audience likes to follow on social media and appeal to them accordingly. There is a worksheet associated with this lesson. You can review it using this lesson as an example and then fill it in for your own delegation plan. Once you get to this stage, you have the right information. Next, let's look at how to share that information with the person you're delegation to. Onto the next lesson. 14. How to Communicate Clearly When Delegating Tasks: You have to communicate your delegation. And we've said that delegation is about responsibility, not tasks. That merits a conversation. You will call a meshing with your employee to explain what your delegation. And to do so, you also want to prepare the proper meeting structure. Remember that you don't call a mission for one directional communication. This is not a spoken memo. This is a conversation. Start by explaining that you have some new areas of work that you believe they will be successful in. Maybe it's because of something they're already doing or something they've said to you in the past or perhaps they have expressly told you that they want to do this work. Remember that this is an opportunity for them. So present it in light of that opportunity. Next, explain the work using the structure that we covered in the previous lesson. A quick reiteration of what we used. We want you to post to social media because it enhances our brand recognition. We do this because we want to see increased sales, increased interaction with our posts, and regular growth of followers. We will be measuring success through likes, shares, clicks to landing pages, time on-site, and conversion rates. To achieve this, I recommend that you create posts that ask questions, encouraged clicking through to an enticing offer and make our audience wants to come back for more. Find out what our audience likes to follow on social media and appeal to them accordingly. That is a lot of information. So after you've told them all of this, you start to break it down into its individual pieces. The best way to get a conversation going is to ask questions. It is easier for the person you are speaking to, to answer questions then to start to just come up with questions on their own. So prepare some questions that are specific, as in not too vague, but also open-ended. So they allow the person to think out loud. Sticking with our example of posting social media, you might ask things like, what do you think is important in social media posting? What else would you add to the different ways to recognize success? What do you recommend for types of posts that will achieve this? You may have recognized that I'm creation questions around each different part of the instruction. You want your conversation to review those four parts of how you got this information together. The goal is to get the person thinking about the work, coming up with ideas and to get them excited about at all. Importantly, you also want to allow them to ask questions. In fact, you want to encourage them to ask questions. By the time you leave that meeting, you should all know who is doing what. You should be able to summarize what you've agreed and confirm it. You as the leader should know how you will monitor that things are getting done. Always buy the results rather than the activity itself. 15. Enable success for your team: Now that you've delegated the work and agreed how you will track performance. You have to make sure that the person you've delegated to is set up for success. You are still responsible for ensuring that they can achieve those outcomes that you all agreed upon. To do this, there are four main things that you must do. The first is to communicate clearly. We covered this in the previous lesson, but it doesn't end with that mission where you're delegating the actual work. As you guide the person, as you give them feedback, as you further train them, the same communication rules apply. It's about what they need to achieve first and foremost, and you have to keep guiding them towards that. Makes sure that you also assign them all they're needed resources. Makes sure the person has everything they need to get the job done properly. This can include different types of tools, different types of software, access to particular information or access to specific people, as well as training on all of the above and on the work itself. You're not allowed to tell somebody to do something and then not give them the essential elements to get it done. So make a list of what those resources are and make sure that they are available. You must allow them time to learn. At first, the person needs to learn the basics, how to do the job at all. Also how they will recognize success. That's something they have to get used to. And of course, how to use all the tools and resources. In the initial stages. They'll probably mirror more closely what you instructed them to do. Be realistic about giving them time to learn all of that. Then as they do learn it and get used to it, they might find their own way of doing things. So allow them that space to try something new and to learn something new. And finally, make sure that you praise and correct them. When somebody is learning something new, you will at first have to correct what they're doing. Always make those corrections constructive. And make sure that you also point out what they are doing that is working well. The risk is that if all you're doing is correcting them, it will sound to them like they're doing everything wrong because all their hearing about is what they're doing wrong. So make sure that you're offering them both the praise and the correction so they know what's working well and they should continue doing and where they need to learn something new or adjust their behaviors. Communicate clearly, assign all necessary resources, be realistic about the time, and make your feedback constructive. This is what will make the delegation work after you've assigned it. 16. How to Measure Delegation Success: When you hire a new person, probably have an onboarding plan organized around a 90 day period in which the person has time to learn everything they need to know about how to do the job. Well, delegation also requires an onboarding period. The person who delegated to has to learn something new. Whether it's a new skill, a new task, a new tool, or simply a new habit, which by the way is not so simple. Track their work closely in the early days so you can identify where they may need more information or a simple correction. This way, when you do step back and let them run with the work, you can be confident that it is being done correctly and you don't have to micromanage them. Remember that one of the challenges to delegation is that it takes longer than just doing it yourself because of all of the explaining and correcting, we'll get this right now in the early stages of delegation, and you will eliminate that problem altogether. You may not require 90 days to onboard delegation, but you do want to take it in stages. How long those stages last will depend on the work itself and the frequency with which you can measure it. Is it daily, weekly, every three days, and so on? At first, you simply want to make sure that they are doing the thing. If this is a new task or habit for them, they have to work it into their daily or regular work. And the first point is to make sure that it's happening at all. Once you're confident that it is, you want to review their output regularly so you can comment on their success. This is that praise and correct phase. You're looking at the effect of what they do and whether it will bring or is bringing the results that you need. Remember, outcome over activities. And finally, you will be able to step back and let the person run with it. This is when you work it into your overall business performance tracking. The day-to-day is no longer up to you. Let them free to do it their way. What do you expect to see in your business when things are working correctly? You've already answered this question. It was part of the delegation plan in a previous lesson. You've discussed it with the person you're delegating to and you've come to a final agreement of what you expect to see. Use that to guide them through this learning process, to measure success, and to eventually sign off on their autonomy and water. You have delegated. 17. Business success or technical success: Speaking of measuring success, it's worth taking a moment to differentiate between technical success in business success. You want to recognize both in your people and your team. And conversely, you want to be able to differentiate these 11 is working and the other one isn't. Sometimes somebody may have achieved business success, but still made a technical error that could get worse next time. So it does need to be corrected. Or if somebody did everything technically correct, but without the right outcome, then clearly there's a deeper problem to investigate. Technical success means success in the execution of the thing. Was the thing done correctly from a technical standpoint, e.g. if somebody is optimizing a social media profile, did they use the right format for the images? Did they use the proper keywords or are they choosing the most effective links for the profile? This is so that the profile doesn't just look good, but it also makes the most of all the features available. In another example, if somebody is supposed to do bookkeeping for a business, did they properly list assets and liabilities? Are they properly tracking inventory and invoices and so on. Now, business success is success in the outcome of the thing. Are you achieving the desired end needed results? For the social media profile, the business result is a great looking, attractive, and useful social media profile. If the goal of the social media accounts is interaction and community, that's what you want to look for to determine if you are achieving the business results for the bookkeeper or the business results are up-to-date and accurate reports that are easily used for tax returns, for financial planning and more. This distinction isn't only important in delegating, it's important throughout your business management. But in particular to delegation. Remember that part of delegating is about training your workers and understanding and being able to speak to the differences between technical and business success is important as part of that training. 18. What not to do: It is always important to know how to do something well, it can be equally important to know how not to do that thing, to know how to do it badly. In other words, being explicit about which errors to avoid should make them easier to notice and therefore it easier to avoid. Let's look at some of the key errors that you want to avoid one-year delegating. The first one is the labor dump. We've touched on this already in this course. And I really don't want you to forget it now. Don't give somebody a heap of work and then ask them to just run off and figure it out. You want to be selective in what you delegate. You want to be specific in what you delegates. And if you do have to delegate a longer list of things, you will want to do them one at a time and give proper attention to each. At the same time. You want to make sure that you're not micro-managing. Don't monitor them so closely that you're never letting the person free to work on their own while you do want to monitor progress until the point that the person is autonomous. That's not the same as tracking each little action, each little step in each moment of their work. You do have to let them learn by doing. Try to avoid any sense of unhealthy competition. Don't stress how easy this thing was for you to do all these years. Or don't point out how good somebody else is it doing this. The person to whom you're delegating will have a learning curve. So let them have their learning curve. Don't set an expectation of how efficient or effective, or fast or fabulous they have to be from day one. Just let them figure it out. And finally, do not let the labor come back around. Don't give into temptation to take it back over. The person who delegated to will likely have questions when they come to you with questions. Do not just do it for them. In fact, you don't always want to just answer the question, either. Don't hand out the answers. Don't remove the opportunity for that person to learn. Instead, help them answer the question that's essential to the training part of delegation is having the person you're delegating to understand all the implications of the job and how to make decisions about it. As you're waiting for the person you're delegating to, to be completely autonomous, lookout for these four mistakes and do everything you can to avoid them or correct them. If you do fall into the trap. 19. Completing Your Final project: You already know everything you need to know to be able to delegate effectively. Now, you get to put it all to work with your final project. Your delegation plan must include what to delegate, how to communicate, and the resources you have to share, and how you're going to make those available. The good news is that you've done much of this work already. Go grab your what to delegate worksheet and your how to delegate worksheets. What you have onto these two is the first part of your work. For your final project, you will bring it all together into a comprehensive plan that will show what you are delegating work you've decided that you no longer want to do. Why that work is important. You'll find this on your previous worksheet. Why the work is changing? By changing, I mean, you're delegating it. So why that change? Why are you delegating it? And finally, the resources needed. The worksheet will allow you to fill in what resources are required in terms of tools, software, skills, information, and people. That's all you need to do. It's your turn now, complete your final project and go delegate. 20. SS Conclusion: Congratulations, you have completed this course on delegation. You have learned everything from why and how we delegate to how to overcome the challenges, both tactical and psychological. Your next step is to complete your class project, your delegation plan, and share it with the other students here in this class. Use the discussions board to upload your final project and to ask questions or share your experience. You can download the exercise templates that are connected to this course and in fact keeps some extra copies in a drawer by your desk every time you're facing a new delegation challenge, pull them out and use this method. You can always contact me right here through the website. I look forward to hearing from you, hearing about your experience in going through this course and seeing all your final projects. For regular business tips, you can subscribe to my weekly email Tuesday on your business, 30 min to work on your business rather than in your business. Go to my website or gpt.com and click on the subscribe button or just ask me and I will subscribe you if the video is your preferred format. I am also on YouTube in a channel called consultant corner for now. Happy delegating.