Imagine this- you just started your new business and successfully hit it out of the park. It’s the perfect blend of what the market needs and your passion. You are getting calls and emails at lighting speed, there are inquiries about your business day and night. This is exactly what you had hoped for. You are pleasantly caught off-guard but not entirely surprised since your service is competitive. Your next steps in the business are to put the sales strategy together to close the call leads you now have. You also need to create invoices to pay your vendors and a system to keep track of your receipts. And last thing on your list is to choose the color template for social media, easy-peazy. Except of course it’s a 24-hour job and you also need to spend time with your family, eat, sleep maybe even take a shower. What you really need to do at this point in your business is to delegate but find it challenging to do so. If this is you, you are not alone, delegating is difficult. It takes a psychological shift in your mind to be able to shift responsibility of a task from your plate to another person’s plate and trust that they will do it well.
There maybe a few reasons holding you back from delegating:
1. You like to be in control. Delegating requires that we let go of control and this can bring up some anxiety in us.
2. You are not sure you have skills to manage the delegation. According to Bandura (1977), self-efficacy influences individuals' choices, efforts, and perseverance. If we doubt our ability to manage the delegation process effectively, we may be less likely to delegate tasks.
3. You struggle with perfectionism. You believe you are the only one who can do the job perfectly to your high standards.
4. You perceive delegation as a luxury especially in the early stages of the business when resources are more limited, you believe you need to handle everything yourself until the business starts earning X.
But there are ways we can make delegating successful. According to Inc Magazine, communication is at the top of the list to make the delegation process successful. You can have a to-do list in writing for your staff and create a process for employees to follow, and/or update as they go along in their work. Have some accountability systems in place, this can look like one-on-one meetings and daily or weekly check-ins. Even if you are an expert at a task or “it’s easy for you” (i.e. bookkeeping) it might not be worth your time to keep doing it while you grow your business.
Reference:
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
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