I'll just do it myself

We have all experienced it in our small business, time is tight and a crucial task must get done. You have explained it (you thought) to an employee but the task is not getting done. Or worse, it is not done the way that you want it done. In order to cope with the frustration, you decide that it is just easier to do it yourself. Then, you wonder why you are working 16 hour days, staying longer than any employee.
I am sure that most of you have been in this situation on many occasions. The problem is that if you can’t find a way out of it, not only will you continue to work those long hours, but it will be very hard to grow your business. You just can’t do everything yourself! What to do? Here are three ideas that may help: concentrate on your strengths and delegate your weaknesses, document well any process that you will delegate, outsource any business process that is not in your businesses’ core competencies.
Concentrate on your strengths and delegate your weaknesses. We are all better at some things than others. Some of us are detailed oriented and well organized, while others work well with the overall themes and direction of a company. The former will probably be better at operations and the latter at setting strategy and guiding marketing campaigns. One of the keys here is to completely honest with about what you do and don’t do well. It is hard to assess yourself by yourself, so don’t be afraid to call on a trusted advisor to help.
A useful exercise when you are trying to determine your role in your company is to create a diagram of the “buckets” or areas of work that you do. You might be surprised by what you find! Once all of your buckets are defined and the activities they include are outlined, you can review more objectively what you are good at and what might be delegate. Doing this exercise with a trusted advisor will add to the depth of understanding that you may gain.
Document any process that you will delegate. Since you have created most of the processes in your company, you know it really well. However, our tendency is to assume that when we explain a process to another, they will catch the nuances without a great deal of detail. I once helped a business owner that thought that a 15 minute explanation of a process that had been honed over several years was all that was necessary. Proper documentation, including the steps of the process, perhaps a diagram of the process flow and a list of the meaning of the terms used form the basics.
There are many useful tools to use when documenting process. Personally, I like to use the different tools that originated in lean concepts are helpful.
Outsource any process that is not among your company’s core competencies. In a small company that is starting to grow, there are many processes that are not among the core competencies. As the company grows, it becomes harder to perform some of these processes with internal staff that are not specialized. Payroll, human resources and benefits come to mind for many companies.
Using these three ideas can help you delegate work more effectively and find more time for yourself.