Are you constantly juggling tasks and feeling overwhelmed? What if we told you that there's a powerful tool right at your fingertips that could lighten your load and empower your whole team? This episode is all about delegation - the often overlooked secret to better time management, improved efficiency, and business success. We're peeling back the layers on this transformative tool, exploring how it can open up opportunities for team growth, innovation, and a healthier work-life balance.
However, we understand that delegation comes with its own set of hurdles - perfectionism, lack of trust, fear of making mistakes. That's why we dive into these common barriers, breaking them down and discussing practical ways to overcome them. With a bit of communication, increased awareness and trust-building, you'll be on your way to developing a culture of delegation within your team. So, if you're ready to boost your business operations and create an environment that's efficient, innovative, and empowered - this episode is a must-listen!
Are you constantly juggling tasks and feeling overwhelmed? What if we told you that there's a powerful tool right at your fingertips that could lighten your load and empower your whole team? This episode is all about delegation - the often overlooked secret to better time management, improved efficiency, and business success. We're peeling back the layers on this transformative tool, exploring how it can open up opportunities for team growth, innovation, and a healthier work-life balance.
However, we understand that delegation comes with its own set of hurdles - perfectionism, lack of trust, fear of making mistakes. That's why we dive into these common barriers, breaking them down and discussing practical ways to overcome them. With a bit of communication, increased awareness and trust-building, you'll be on your way to developing a culture of delegation within your team. So, if you're ready to boost your business operations and create an environment that's efficient, innovative, and empowered - this episode is a must-listen!
Alright, I must say I'm very, very, very excited to talk about this.
Speaker 1:I'm always excited to talk about all these these topics on the podcast, but I just whenever I have a moment with any business owner, if they're not delegating, I love to start planting those seeds of delegation. So that's what we're gonna be talking today about. We're gonna be talking about the art of delegation, why it matters, the benefits you just can't ignore, the signs that it's time to delegate, the common barriers to delegation, the consequences of not delegating, breaking down the process and starting to delegate yesterday, asap. Alright, without further ado, let's go ahead and dive right in, because this is gonna be a lengthy episode with lots of wonderful tips, tricks and awareness building around delegation to make your life easier and happier and to increase your growth and so much. Okay, see, I'm already going on tangents with delegation. I knew I was gonna do that. Okay, the art of delegation let's talk about it how and why to delegate effectively. Now diving into the world of delegation. It's a skill that, honestly, can truly transform the way you work, the way you lead, the way you feel in your business and by the end of this conversation, I want you to hopefully understand not only how important delegation is, but also how to do it effectively to boost your business growth, your team efficiency and your own well-being and livelihood. So why does delegation matter? I want you to think of delegation as this, like secret weapon for your success. It's all about sharing responsibility strategically to achieve these bigger goals and manage your time better. When you delegate tasks, you're not lightning your own load not only your own load right, you're not just doing that, but you're also empowering your team. You're helping the growth they're building account culture of ownership. You're opening up opportunities for you to be able to do things you didn't have time for, like work on the business rather than in the business. So there's so many benefits. So let's talk about the benefits, because really it's a win-win for you and your team. You get to focus on all the things you want to be putting your focus on as a business owner.
Speaker 1:Okay, so number one, number one benefit, or the first benefit we're going to talk about, rather, improved efficiency. Delegation allows business owners to focus on high priority tasks while team members handle are able to handle some routine or time-consuming activities that free up your space. Now, this improves overall productivity, operational efficiency, but this also improves efficiency in allowing you to work on those pillars of the business where you need to be. You need to be in those pillars, whatever those pillars may be. There's an I'll do a whole other podcast on the on the pillars of where you need to be right, working on your business. But when you're working on, or when you have improved efficiency, what I mean is like you're being efficient and effective at what you need to be efficient and effective in. If you are answering client calls and you are scheduling and you're working on the claims for insurance, it's taking you away from being able to work on taking new insurances, improving quality of care, looking at how we can improve our benefit package for our employee, how we can market and do education and bring more clients in. There's so much that you need to be doing as the business owner, working on your business. So, number one, you're improving efficiency. The next thing is time management, which I kind of dove into a little already, but delegating your tasks is going to free up really valuable time that you need to concentrate on strategic planning, planning, decision-making and business development, where you should be at. It allows you to have skill utilization where you're assigning tasks to team members with the relevant skills that are going to help you most. Right, and they're going to help and where they're going to be best at really ensuring that the job is done by someone that's best suited for it, leading to better outcomes right, so you're utilizing the skills of the team as you're delegating tasks to those people who are going to thrive with those tasks.
Speaker 1:The next benefits is work-life balance. When you delegate you, you're able to take time off right. You're able to decrease your workload and you may fill that up with other things, but you're able to have more of a work-life balance. If you're doing everything in the business, you are most likely working over 40 hours a week for sure, so you can't continue to do that. That's not going to be sustainable.
Speaker 1:Delegation can help you achieve like, healthier, happier work-life balance and by really reducing this burden of all this work, excessive workload and the excessive stress and just everything being on your plate. And this is not necessary because others can help you. Other people can do it, you can train them, you can find someone who you trust, someone who does a good job. That is a possibility. You don't have to do everything. Another benefit is team empowerment. By delegating tasks, you're really empowering those team members. You're giving them more responsibilities, more opportunity for growth. That's going to boost job morale or that's going to boost employee morale and job satisfaction. You help to develop skills. This way, too, you provide the team a chance to develop these new skills and broaden their experience and enhance their value to the organization and their feeling in the organization.
Speaker 1:The next benefit you may not agree with right now, but this delegating allows for increased innovation. You can find people who can do things better than you can do them. Remember your skills. Where are you best utilized? You can find someone else to do something that they're going to excel further in you. And also, then again, you're going to free up time to use your time to work on the things you need to work on that you have those skills in. When business owners delegate, they're allowing their team to contribute more ideas, solutions, their own unique perspectives and problem-solving skills. It's going to foster innovation and more creativity things you have not thought of. I'm telling you, with delegation, I know that my team members can do it far better than me. They have innovative ideas, they're creative, the tasks belong to them, they do it best and this allows me to do what I do best because I have the time to do it.
Speaker 1:Also, another benefit that's huge is scalability. A lot of people think delegation, when you're delegating, is going to Take up more resources right, which it does financially but what happens is it really is an investment. It allows you to scale. You're putting your investing back into your business with that additional team member, with delegating and paying someone else to do those tests because again, they might be able to do it better than you, but also you give more time back to yourself to scale and grow. It's really essential in scaling a business.
Speaker 1:If you want to scale, you have to delegate. You cannot delegate, you cannot scale without delegation, at least not happily and not forever. Right, you will absolutely burn out. You cannot spend that much time doing everything while you're also trying to grow Absolutely not Really. Delegation enables growth. When I started delegating, that's when I saw more growth and now, instead of being afraid of delegation, I am literally all about it. How can I delegate every possible thing to open up new opportunities for myself? I want to delegate, delegate, delegate, which was a huge change from when I started. So it really enables growth without overwhelming the business owner you and distributes the tasks amongst your capable and wonderful team.
Speaker 1:So you heard some of the many benefits and you may still be like well, am I there? Am I at a place when I should delegate? Should I get a VA and executive assistant, a virtual assistant? Should I give this to a team member? Should I promote a team member? I don't know if I'm ready for that. I don't know if it's time. Well, let's talk about the signs that it is time to delegate.
Speaker 1:The first sign overwhelm. Are you consistently feeling overwhelmed by the volume of tasks and responsibilities on your plate and the amount of time that you're spending in your business, and are you seeing that that time is not going to decrease in the near future? There's no way to. You're just gonna keep that on your plate, right? So if you're overwhelmed by the amount of time your tasks and it's leading to this overwhelm, the stress, reduced productivity, burnout, feelings of distress in the business, maybe resentment in the business, that is a true that's a very telling sign that you need to delegate.
Speaker 1:The next sign is a lack of focus on your core responsibilities. You find yourself spending more time on routine or administrative tasks rather than these strategic, high-impact activities that contribute to your business growth and the reason this happens is because you're tired, you're burnt out, it's harder to be creative, it's harder to think because you're so run down and so busy with all those tasks that you have on your plate. The third sign is missed deadlines. So important tasks are delayed or missed because you can't keep up with your workload and then therefore it creates quality decline. So that's number four. That's the fourth sign your work quality begins to suffer because you're spreading yourself too thin and you can't decide and dedicate the necessary time and attention to each of those tasks. Number five the fifth sign is stagnated growth. So your business growth has plateaued or even started to decrease because you're unable to invest in that time in strategic planning and that business development. So you feel that there's a lack of growth, stagnated growth or maybe you're going backwards.
Speaker 1:Sixth sign no work-life balance. You struggle to maintain a healthy work-life balance, impacting your personal life and overall well-being. Number seven there's employee underutilization. You have capable team members who are not being fully utilized. They want leadership, they want promotions, they want to do things differently and it's leading them to be disengaged and have a decreased morale. Number eight you might see that you are increasing micromanagement. You find yourself micromanaging team members because you can't or don't want to trust them to handle these tasks independently, so you do it for them. Number nine and you may not feel this one so much, but it is absolutely a sign that might be something you just don't see, which is lack of opportunities. You miss out on growth opportunities or you fail to address emerging challenges because you're too tired of the day-to-day tasks.
Speaker 1:Number 10, time consuming administrative work. You're spending a significant portion of your day on these admin tasks like email management, scheduling, billing, data entry, things like that that are really busy work, admin tasks that you can absolutely train and delegate. Then inefficiencies okay, and this is the last one we'll go over. There's so many more to this, but this is the last one we'll do. So inefficiencies you start to notice inefficiencies, or like it's not quite the quality you want, or as the systems aren't where you want them to be, it's just things are not where you want them to be and you see the areas of improvement and how you can change them, but you lack the time and the energy to address these changes. And, of course, these inefficiencies can cause a lot of problems like increased turnover, plateaued productivity, decreased productivity, declining customer satisfaction, more confusion, more time, more workload, because it's inefficient. So this is also another very telling sign that you need to delegate, and when you start to notice all of these 11 signs, it's a clear indicator that you should consider delegation. So if you're there and you're seeing some of these signs by listening to this podcast, that's great. You're considering delegation, you're learning more about it, you're in the contemplation stage, hopefully, of your stage of change.
Speaker 1:Delegating tasks not only relieves your workload, it also empowers you. It empowers your team, it fosters growth, it allows you to focus on high impact activities and needle movers and drive your business forward. So it's a wonderful thing. It's a wonderful thing. So why aren't we all doing it? Why aren't we all delegating?
Speaker 1:Well, there are some very common barriers to delegation for someone who has not delegated yet or who is resistant to delegation. It's very common for people to not want to give up what they're doing because they lack of trust, they feel like they do it best, they may be worried about the finances around delegation and hiring someone else or promoting someone, and so it's very common to be resistant to delegation. So what are the barriers you may be struggling with? I'm gonna list some off and I want you to ask yourself is this something that I am dealing with? Is this a barrier that I might be having when it comes to delegation? Is this the reason why I do not want to hire an assistant, although I'm being told by everyone to hire an assistant?
Speaker 1:First barrier perfectionism, perfectionism. Some business owners have a real strong desire for perfectionism and they believe that they can perform tasks better than everyone else and they believe that they're the only one that can perform these tasks to these standards that they have. And, of course, this isn't gonna make it difficult if they have this belief, because you're gonna fear that others aren't gonna meet your high expectations. Perfectionism keeps people back all the time. In addition, lack of trust is another super common barrier, and trust is a fundamental component of delegation, and that might mean experimenting. The first couple of VAs you get might not be good fits and you might find that you can't trust them, but you can't get to that person you can trust and you can't find that person you can trust that helps you out. So much until you experiment and maybe go through a couple not good fit virtual assistants, but lack of trust for delegating to new people.
Speaker 1:We can also talk about lack of trust in your current team. When you don't trust your current team's abilities or their judgment, you're not gonna wanna delegate important tasks, there's no way. So lack of trust is big. So it's important to ask yourself why? Where's this lack of trust coming from? Is this a me thing? Is this because maybe I have team members that I can't trust or I might, I know will not be able to step up to that task? What is it? Find that out so you know what your next step is.
Speaker 1:Barrier number three control issues. Business owners who wanna maintain complete control over every aspect of their business. They're gonna resist deletion and they're gonna burn out super quick. It's very common, again, to have control issues where you may feel uncomfortable relinquishing control or these decision making tasks and those control issues will absolutely get you stuck and will not move you forward with wanting to delegate. Number four kind of goes along with those control issues. If you have those control issues and you want to avoid mistakes from happening, fear of mistakes is a big barrier Because delegating tasks involves a degree of risk. Right, it absolutely does, because team members learning are going to make mistakes. They may make more mistakes than you and oftentimes people don't want to move through those or deal with mistakes or those fear that errors can occur and impact the business or impact you, and so they don't want to move forward with getting over that hump and doing that training and becoming resilient with the maybe some of the mistakes that are made in learning from those and just training differently and moving past to again then have a well trained person who is not making mistakes. So that fear of mistakes that goes along with control issues is definitely a barrier.
Speaker 1:And the next one is time investment. So it is. It does take time to delegate Initially. It doesn't save you time. You spend more time delegating because you have to train, you have to have extra communication, it takes effort to find and train team members, and so it's absolutely understandable if you're already feeling swamped and overwhelmed. If you feel you need to now invest more time, you're going to be reluctant.
Speaker 1:Next barrier is just it could be just a lack of delegation skills. I mean effective delegation does require specific skills such as clear communication, setting expectations, providing feedback, and business owners who lack these are going to struggle. They're going to struggle to delegate effectively, absolutely. So it is a skill, but you can develop that skill and what better way to try than to start delegating and practicing your skills? Next barrier is a previous negative experience. When you have delegated Remember, this is experimental, so you will have negative experiences. But if you had a couple of negative experiences and stopped there and didn't continue to move forward to have a positive experience, that's what your, that's what your painting delegation as as this negative experience which is absolutely going to cause this barrier to wanting to move forward. If you say, well, this is what delegation is. It causes more problems, more stress and more time. Put on me Absolutely a barrier.
Speaker 1:And lastly, a barrier to delegation is unclear priorities. So if you're unsure of where your priorities priority should be, where the noodle movers are, where you should be in your business, you're going to find it hard to make that decision, to let go of the tasks that you are doing and the understanding, the why of why you should be delegating, and you're going to be unsure of which tasks to delegate. Now, if you're experiencing these barriers again, it's okay. These are common barriers, common barriers. So it's okay if you're there, but we do want to overcome these and we can overcome these with a combination of things like improved communication, increased awareness, trust building, skill development and shift in mindset, because delegation can be such a powerful tool for business owners. Such about powerful tool. I mean it has been such a powerful tool for me.
Speaker 1:Every day I'm asking what more can I delegate? And when I started I was asking what the heck can I even delegate? So very, very different, and that's because I've seen how powerful of a tool it is, how it helps scale, how it helps the team morale, how it helps my life and my work life balance, how it grows and sustains the business. I mean it's it's just like I said in the beginning of the podcast. This is why it's one of the first things I coach business coaches to do is delegate or delegate more.
Speaker 1:So if, after you listen to this far into the episode, you're saying I actually really want to delegate or you're considering delegating and you move from the contemplation stage to preparation phase of your process of change, then let's talk about breaking down the process and starting to delegate. Because how do we actually delegate? I'm going to give you some places to start, all right. So the first thing is we need to start picking the right tasks to delegate, right. So start by choosing tasks that are suitable for delegation, things that are routine, time consuming, things that can be trained, things that you do not like doing, and what I would say here is take out a piece of paper, take out a piece of paper and I want you to write down all of the things that you don't like doing, or all of the busy work, or all of the things that might be trainable. Okay, list them all out and maybe take a whole week and just write down everything out, or write down everything that you do, and then circle the ones that you can delegate, the things that you can train, the things that you do not like doing, and then take those tasks and they might all fall into a virtual assistant role or you might find that they fall into a few different roles. So then take them and make them into categories. Do task categorization? Do task categorization? Do task categorization? Okay.
Speaker 1:So create a list of these tasks and categorize them based on the complexity, the urgency, the specialty and the criticality right of your responsibility. So this is going to help you to understand who you're going to delegate to. So you might find that in your list of tasks you want a clinical director. You want to promote someone to clinical director. You might want a virtual assistant and you might want a biller, or you might again find that they all fall into one role of virtual assistant. It just depends on where you are in your business and what tasks you want to delegate. And then from there, start small. Start with a few manageable tasks that someone can start taking, and it can help you to gain confidence in their ability before you just give them everything right, especially if you're really nervous about delegating.
Speaker 1:The next action step you can do is make sure you have clear communication and you're providing support. You absolutely want to do really good training, have really good communication and clear communication so everyone understands their new roles. Explain the task clearly, include the goals, include the expectations, do check-ins, do evaluations, set deadlines, have quality standards, provide a handbook, a detailed description. Better yet, have them create the handbook as you're handing them these tasks In the handbook clearly write down what's needed to be done, include specific steps, requirements, guidelines, expectations, and then provide support as much as they need right, as much as appropriate. If you're providing too much support for too long, it might not be a good fit, because you're trying to get things off your plate, not put more things onto your plate, but they're absolutely going to need support to start, and the more support you give them in the beginning, the more they're going to thrive.
Speaker 1:So equip your team with resources, tools, training, open communication, encouragement, confidence. Be their cheerleader. You want to move toward empowerment and autonomy? Okay, because this is going to make them feel good and this is going to make you feel good where you can truly let go and be confident with delegation. Open up your days for more, where you should be in those tenants working on your business rather than in your business.
Speaker 1:So there it is delegation. I can talk about this for days, but I will stop here and I will let you move forward and start to think about what you listen to today and ask yourself where am I at in my journey in delegation? You may be someone who's already delegated but need to delegate more. You might be someone who's never delegated ever. Either way, delegation is truly, truly wonderful If you do it right, if you don't bail on the experience, if you're having a bad experience. Delegation is what helps your well-being, what helps your business sustainability, what helps its growth, what empowers your team. It's absolutely where it's at and there's no business that can scale without delegation. There's no business that can grow without delegation. The more minds, the better, the more hands, the better. So do not be afraid. I hope this planted some good seeds and happy delegating Until next time and continue being the badass business owner that you are and remember, take care of yourself, because the journey matters. It's not all about the destination. Alright, I'll see you on the next episode.