Learn to Delegate

I’ve written about delegation before, but I continue to think about it because so many small business owners don’t do it very well.

Entrepreneurs often like to pull all the significant levers in the business and push all the important buttons. They built the business and know the critical parts of it better than anyone, so they don’t hand off any core decisions, responsibilities, or activities to anyone else. Yet by failing to delegate, the owner is unable to keep good people and unable to grow the business beyond his or her personal limitations. In the end, it’s a trust issue. What if I do hand off something important to someone else and they screw it up?

Here’s a way to limit your risk and gradually learn to delegate effectively.

Divide the all the company’s identifiable, distinct decisions, responsibilities, or activities into three categories: A, B, and C. When you assign an A responsibility to someone, instruct that person that this responsibility is theirs and theirs alone. They should just go ahead and carry it out. Don’t call, don’t write, don’t report to me when you’ve done it. Just do it.

When giving out a B responsibility, you instruct that person that this is still a responsibility that is theirs, but you want to be consulted before they pull the trigger on it.

You can show your subordinates a list of C responsibilities, but you don’t give those out. Those are the decisions, responsibilities, or activities that you will continue to reserve for yourself.

If this is done in a clear, well-defined way, you will have drawn very effective boundaries for your people. You shouldn’t have anyone going off the reservation and doing things they have no authority to do. In short, you maintain control. But better yet, you begin a process of delegation that can grow over time. Again, this is a trust issue. So you build trust as you see how effectively your subordinates handle the responsibilities you’ve given them. Then more of your C responsibilities can become B responsibilities and given to someone else. Likewise, a B can be transformed into an A.

This is an evolutionary way to build delegation into your company’s culture. Ultimately, your subordinates will be doing the things they are qualified to do, and you’ll be left with only those things that truly belong on your plate.

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