The Importance Of Delegating

While starting a business, you will often find yourself acting as a jack of all trades. It is highly likely that you will find yourself responsible for sales, finances, marketing, manufacturing, and distribution. Trying to do everything will not only take its toll on you, but it might also prove detrimental to your health and the general growth of the business. That’s where delegation comes in. 

Delegation allows you to hand over certain responsibilities to other people who are better skilled and are better aligned to that particular task. Understanding how to efficiently delegate responsibilities will earn you more time that will ultimately allow you to dedicate more time to managing your business, thus helping you achieve more for the growth of your business. 

For small business owners, especially those who are just getting into business for the first time in their lives, delegation does not come easily. This is because they want to get everything absolutely right, and they may not have the experience to avoid micromanagement. Small business owners who avoid delegation are more likely to feel the effects of burnout such as exhaustion and low motivation, all in the effort to get their businesses off the ground. 

The Benefits of Delegation 

Delegation is a very important skill. One of the most fundamental challenges a business owner will encounter is to teach people how to go about their work so that it benefits the business. Delegation is of benefit to organizations, direct reports, and business managers. It even goes further than the scope of business management in that the development of teams and employees is also at risk without proper delegation. However, it remains one of the most underdeveloped and underutilized functions of management. Here are some of the benefits a growing business can enjoy with proper delegation.

1. It’s a Worthy Time Saver 

Delegating tasks that you do not need to do personally will free up time that you could dedicate to other tasks that are more reliant on your expertise, experience, and energy. Delegating will save you time to do more administrative duties thus improving the organizational systems for your business. 

For example, spending time just to check on the time cards of your employees can be considered a waste of company time that you could otherwise spend on establishing collaborative partnerships with other companies. By avoiding delegation, you will place a heavy load on yourself and run the risk of leaving yourself so overwhelmed that your health and productivity might suffer tremendously. 

2.  Better and Faster Decision Making

Delegating will help you make better and more informed decisions because your employees who are closest to the work detail usually have the best opinion and view of how things truly are on ground level. For example, the sales manager of a branch of your business located at a particular location will be best poised to make decisions and give opinions and views regarding that particular region. 

Delegating will also save a lot of time because employees will be tasked with making the right decisions themselves rather than checking in with their superiors, who might have to check in with their superiors each time they face a challenge and a decision needs to be made quickly. 

3. It Helps in the Development of Employees    

As a business owner, you definitely have a few skills and traits that team members can learn. The best way of going about this is making sure that before delegating certain duties to them, you can teach them the skills they require to undertake related tasks. This will not only give you a skilled labour force but will hugely work in your favour as a business owner in that your employee morale will and team spirit will improve significantly. Having confident team members will improve their judgment as well as how they take responsibility. 

4.  Development of Your Own Skills as a Manager

Effective delegation will allow you a lot more time to work on your skills and develop your capacities as an entrepreneur. Some of the skills you will find improving include communication as you need to learn the practice of assigning roles, leadership because you will train and assist your team members as they do their work, as well as honesty and trust in your employees to do the assigned tasks diligently. 

Delegating will help you achieve your goals in less time and set up even higher objectives to reach. You will find yourself ultimately becoming more efficient, less stressed, and your vision for your enterprise will be much wider. 

5. Overall Business Success

The advantage of delegation, especially when achieving business goals, is that the growth and success of the business will be accredited to an entire team and not an individual. Success will make your team members feel they play a big role in the business and are fundamental to its success. This might empower them enough to have the confidence to take on even tougher challenges.

Conclusion 

Business management and delegation go together. However, for a lot of people, delegating is not easy. Leaving even the easiest task in the hands of others is almost impossible for them. Accepting that you are not able to do everything yourself is the first step towards delegating. It’s important to note that you don’t need to delegate more to achieve efficiency. You only need to delegate properly. This means getting the right tasks to delegate as well as having the right people who can be trusted with a job.