Ep 45 - Why Delegating Tasks to Others is the Key to Effectively Empowering Your Team

Are you stuck in the cycle of doing everything yourself because you fear delegating? Or maybe you're spending countless hours explaining tasks instead of entrusting them to your team. If either of these scenarios resonate with you, then this podcast episode is going to hit home. We'll tackle how micromanaging and bottleneck behaviors are actually hampering your growth and inflating your work hours. More importantly, I'll reveal how to effectively delegate and empower your team, Freeing you from daily details, allowing you to refocus on your vision and reclaim your freedom. It's time to transform your business dynamics and scale faster. Let's dive in. Are you that driven entrepreneur who believes that working harder holds the key to your dreams? Are you drowning in the day to day task wishing you had more time to strategize and cast the vision for your business growth? Hi. I'm Donna Dube, your guide on this entrepreneurial journey.

I've walked in your worn out shoes, burning the midnight oil, convinced that sheer hard work was the secret to success. Just one more email, one more task until I found myself on a one way trap to burnout. But here's the twist in the tale. I discovered that success isn't just about working harder, it's about working smarter. It's about being intentional with our time. It's about steering our ship with focus because no team, system, or automation can outperform a lack of direction. In this podcast, I'm sharing with you all the strategies for business growth that it took me years to learn. If you're ready to step out of the daily overwhelm so you can amplify your profits, then I'm ready to teach you.

I believe the only limit to your business growth is the one you set for yourself. Go grab a notebook, warm up that cup of tea, and let's do this. Hello entrepreneurs. Today I've got an exclusive invitation just for you. I want to help you focus on the main bottleneck holding your business back as we both know that solving it efficiently and permanently can create massive momentum and results. Sign up for an Operations in Your Pocket 90-minute strategy session where we'll tackle your business challenges and create a personalized growth plan. Book a clarity call to see if Operations in Your Pocket is the missing piece for your business. Visit www.ceoamplify.ca/ops

to schedule your call. Let's make 2024 your year of breakthroughs. Can't wait to chat with you and cheers to your success. Well, hello. Hello. Welcome back business owners. I'm so happy you're here today. I'm going to dive into a topic that often stirs up some discomfort around small business owners, and that's the topic of delegation.

So if you've started to squirm a little bit while you're listening to this, don't be surprised. It's a hot topic and something that a lot of us have trouble with when we first bring on team members. So I wanna start with asking you a question. Do you trust the people who work for you? And when I say trust, I don't mean do you like them or do you trust them as friends? What I'm asking here is do you truly feel able to outsource tasks to them and confident that they'll get it done quickly and exactly how you want it. Do you trust the people who work for you? Take a moment and think about it, and if you answered no, or if you even hesitated a bit before saying yes, then I want you to listen closely to this episode because I think it's gonna help you. Alright. So let's consider a scenario. Imagine you're a baker and you've got a bakery.

That's your business. You have a team, including people who handle orders, packaging, customer service, marketing, etcetera, But you find yourself constantly stepping in. You're going behind the scenes and tweaking the social media posts. You're repackaging the cookies because, well, they just weren't arranged just right. Or you're actually responding to customer emails. What you're doing is spending countless hours explaining what needs to be done or worse you're doing the task yourself because it would be easier and faster. How many of you have said that before? It would be faster and easier if I just did this. This is a very, very, very common thread among entrepreneurs.

And today I wanna break it down a little bit and show you why it would not actually be easier and faster. You might ask yourself why would you pay someone else to do something slowly, and not the way you want it, when you can just do it yourself? And, this may seem logical at first glance, but the truth is friends, listen close the truth is that this approach is actually keeping your business from growing. It's the reason why you're also working way, way, way too many hours. It's actually stopping you from getting to that next level of growth that you're trying to see. Because what's happening is that as you're spending the time redoing the tasks that you are paying your team for. First, you're having an expense to pay your team. Second, you're using your time to redo something which is not in your zone of genius, which is not CEO level tasks And your rate is much higher than your team's rate, but third and probably most important here is that the time you're spending redoing tasks or doing tasks because you can "do it better and faster," you're not spending being the CEO of your business. And when you don't spend time each and every week being the CEO of your business, your profitability suffers. Your ability to grow to that next level suffers, and you end up being stagnant. But don't worry, it doesn't have to be this way.

You see, the key is to leverage your team effectively so that you can step away from those exhausting day to day details and really refocus on your vision and growth. Let me give you another example. Let's say you own an online coaching business. You have a team of assistants who help with scheduling and client communication and content creation, but you find yourself revising the content they produce because it's not exactly how you envisioned it. If you are listening and you find yourself in these scenarios and these are ringing in your head then I want you to listen to this next part because the first step to fixing this is to truly understand that micromanaging and bottleneck behavior is actually hindering your growth. Instead, you need to clearly communicate your expectations. We need to stop assuming that our team knows exactly what we want. Each team member that you have and that you bring on into your business needs to be taught what success looks like, when tasks need to be completed, and how to give you the results you want.

You need to make yourself available for questions and for coaching them to success, and this will make a world of difference. It empowers your team to do their job right and gives them the confidence to take on even more responsibility and to grow with you inside your business. So here's some best practices that we need to put into place to be able to scale and to be able to grow to that next level. Your team is there. They're eager, but you struggle with letting go because they may not do things "your way." And I want to challenge you to think about the fact that if you had a team member who could do a task for you and free up, let's say 5 hours a week for you, and they were able to perform that task at 80% as good and as in much time as you do, would that be good enough? Because I challenge you to say if you can pay a team member at a much lower rate than your own rate, allow you to step out of the day to day and focus on the CEO level tasks, and they can do that task 80% as good as you plan. It's a win win. Folks, there are not too many things in the online business world that are life and death.

And so yes, something may go out with an incorrect link. Yes, something might be on your social post and you wouldn't have said it exactly that way. But does it really matter? If we're 80% there let's coach, let's teach, and get that person all the way to success. Rather than taking that responsibility away from them putting it back on your plate and then complaining you don't have enough time. Okay. So we wanna make sure that each team member is hired for the right fit, right? And when I say right fit it's a couple of different areas. So one, they have to have the right skill set. Obviously, if you're going to hire someone to do social media management for you, you want them to have some skills in the platforms and the channels that you're posting on.

Right? If you're going to hire a fractional director of operations you want to make sure that that person has a skill set in project management, in leading teams, in being, you know, a sound board for you as CEO in leadership. Right? So you have to make sure that that skill set is there. No doubt, but that's not the only piece. The second piece we want to make sure that they're right for is experience. Have they done this before in a similar type of environment? Have they led a team before? If that's what you're bringing someone into your business for, have they successfully manage someone's social media channel? If that's what you're bringing someone in for. So you wanna look at skill set. You wanna look at experience. And the 3rd piece is their wiring.

How do they tick? What gives them energy? What brings them forward? What makes them, what's driving them? And on the flip side of that, what drives them absolutely crazy? What can't they stand? And you wanna make sure that wiring and how they think fits with your business. And last but certainly not least is a culture fit. You want to make sure that you're surrounded by world class help to reach you, to help you reach these new uplevel, Right? They have to be able to fit with your culture. What is the culture of your business? Have you even taken time to think and work through that? If you haven't definitely a big piece you gotta look at. So skill set, experience, their wiring, and culture fit. So those are the things we want to look for when we're hiring a new team member. When we say the team member has to have the right fit, that's what we mean. And then we don't want to assume that they know what we want.

So once we've hired them, each team member of our team needs to be taught 4 things. This is going to sound a little bit basic when I say them, but trust me, there are so many of us as entrepreneurs that tend to mess this part up and we assume that team members know what's going on in our head. So these four things before we assign them any task we need to make sure we've got these four things clear. 1, how do they give us what we want? 2. The way we want it. 3. Exactly what it should look like to be successful. And last, but not least, when we want it done by.

So you see the solution here is to train your team effectively. Show them how tasks should be done. Give them examples. Establish clear deadlines so that they know exactly what success looks like. They know how to give us what we're looking for. They know the way we want it. They know exactly what success would look like so they can compare what they've done, and they know when we want it done by Because remember effective delegation isn't about just passing off work that we don't want to do. It's about developing our employees skill and freeing up our time to be able to focus on strategic growth. Trusting in your team is crucial for business growth.

Remember at the beginning I asked you, do you fully trust your team? So there's 2 pieces to this, right? Obviously, we want to make sure we've hired correctly so we have the right fit. Do they have the skill set, experience, the wiring, and now they culture fit? And then the second piece is, did we set them up for success? Did we show them how? Do we show them the way? Do we show them what success looks like? Did we give a deadline? Both of those pieces have to be working for this to be successful. We have to let go of those micromanaging habits that we sometimes get in the culture of doing and learn to delegate effectively. And when we do that, we'll find that not only does our business flourish, but so does our team's morale and their productivity. They're happy to work for you. They're providing suggestions. They're excited to start their day. The churn rate and turnover rate has significantly reduced and your business is running like a well oiled machine.

So remember, as a business owner, your role is not just managing operations, but also leading people towards success. So I challenge you today to start delegating effectively, and watch your business growth. Because friends, this is how business owners make twice as much in terms of revenue and work half the time. Effective delegation is such a powerful tool to transform your operations when you do it correctly. So remember each team member, when we hire them, it needs to be a fit on those four points. And every time we delegate something to a team member, we need to make sure we're clearly stating what the objective is, What success looks like. When we want it done. How we want it.

So that they can thrive and be successful. Alrighty, I hope this episode was helpful for you. If delegation is something that you have struggled with before in the past, I would love to hear about it. You can pop in my email or you can head over to the CEO Amplify Facebook growth and let me know how delegation has worked for you so far. Maybe you've got a success story that you want to share, or maybe you've got a question or something that didn't go right. We all learn so much by listening and seeing other people's experiences. So I really hope you'll come over and share with me something about what you've learned about delegation. Alrighty.

I'll see you all next week. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, I kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me. Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.