Delegate More Effectively: 5 Tips for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, task delegation is critical. Not only will task delegation allow your business and your employees to be more productive and efficient, but it will also allow you – the business owner – to focus on the more important tasks. These tasks include making important decisions for the growth of your business. So, it is imperative that you build the skills that you need to delegate and hand over tasks that will only weigh you down. These tasks include everything from the minutia of filing documents to sending out reminder emails to clients and business partners. Here are five tips for small business owners to delegate more effectively.

  1. Build your communication skills. When learning how to delegate more effectively, you want to be able to use your powers of communication to tell an employee or an assistant exactly how to complete a task. Not only do you want to limit the number of questions – questions can always bog down the delegation process – but you also want to be able to teach an employee how to do a certain job better in the future. It will take practice, but you want to start somewhere – eventually, you’ll become a pro.
  2. Keep a detailed and easy to read the list of all the tasks you want to have delegated. As a small business owner, it can be easy to become weighed down by all the things you need to get done during the course of the day. This is why you want to have a list of all the tasks that need to be completed. Knowing what tasks need to be completed will make the delegation process a lot smoother. Not only do you want to have a list of tasks to hand off, but you also want to have deadlines and priority levels for each task.
  3. Use virtual tools. There are many applications and task delegation platforms that can make everything a lot easier and productive. You may start to wonder how you’ve gone on for so long without these tools. For instance,ME offers you the ability to hire a virtual assistant. As a small business – with limited resources – the ability to hire a virtual assistant can make your company vastly more efficient.
  4. Know when tasks are completed or when deadlines are coming close. Having a system where you can track the completion of certain tasks is vital for certain businesses. So, you want to utilize some kind of platform that can track this information. If you have a manager that you work with, perhaps you have him or her monitor the status of all the tasks that you have delegated out.
  5. Trust that projects will be completed. As a business owner, you need to be able to trust that the tasks that you delegate out will be completed. If you are continually worried that certain jobs won’t be finished, it will defeat the purpose of delegating tasks. As a small business owner, it will be hard not to micromanage, but if you want to have a well oiled and efficiently running machine, properly trusting that delegated tasks will be completed is paramount.