Business Growth: The Art of Delegation

Your company might be blossoming, but chances are it may not be a successful or industrious as you'd like it to be. Small to medium business owners main responsibilities are reduced costs, increased business profitability, and advanced company growth. A business leader’s main duty is to focus on these vital aspects of their business. In this article we look at the ways to free up the business leader’s time from the day to day running of their business so they can spend more time increasing profitability, and growth of the company. One very important way of doing this is to delegate your tasks to other company members or by outsourcing tasks for specialisation. We look into the ways in which business owners, leaders, and managers can achieve this goal.

Business nowadays is far to complex to take it on alone. Bottom line is that the business principal should be concentrating on actions that bring the most value to the business and increase competitive advantage over the industry competition. These might be fine tuning the product, pricing, supply buying, organisation, cost cutting, human resources or finance and accounting. Hiring a manager or a team of managers to delegate the day to day business tasks is vital to business development. Discover how to do less and delegate more.
Delegation is finding the right resources or personnel to do the most efficient jobs, training them to do those jobs, and leaving them to do it, while you can get back to business. Obligatory responsibilities that can be done by others should be delegated. In any expanding business the need to delegate will become increasingly important.

Wikipedia notes ‘Delegation (also called deputation) is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person (normally from a manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities.’

So how do we decide what tasks should be delegated? If you can document the processes that are necessary to do a job or task, then the business owner will not have to do those jobs. If you can hire a person with the skills to do the job, who can follow the processes outlined to do that job, and then add their creativity in a unique way, then you will be free to take a step back and look at other jobs. Once the responsibility for that job is allocated, the business owner can focus on vital aspects of their business, which cannot be assigned. If the job is not being done as well as you had wished, then either you have the wrong person for the job, or you may have got in their way.

Delegation is a powerful tool in company growth because it allows for specialisation of tasks. If the business owner is predominantly a salesman, then he should be delegating the marketing to a marketing specialist, design to a design expert, and accounting to an accountant. Obviously small to medium sized companies might not have the need to delegate full time. Outsourcing can be a useful way to delegate jobs that others can do better, by assigning projects to an external company. This means again you are controlling all aspects of the business rather than being tied up by tasks that could have been done by others.

Once a task has been delegated suddenly there is accountability. The business owner or manager can measure the delegation process by feedback from the jobs allotted. Then fine tuning can improve certain processes and new resources can be found for unproductive ones. Company growth will increase across the board as you fine tune these jobs, rather than trying to fix them yourself.

If you would like to learn to delegate, the Catalyst Partnership, the business specialists in France, can help you to delegate assignable tasks, to keep you in the driving seat and boost company growth.