The Benefits of Delegation
It’s a common theme among small business owners that the hardest part is giving up control and I would say this is true. Being on my second small business myself, I would also say that it is much easier the second time and just as it was in the first an absolute necessity for growth. I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into with Tiger Sheep, and I know the role that I eventually want to play and the roles that I don’t. Like all good plans though, it enters a state of flux the moment real life gets ahold of it and we end up rolling with the punches and just trying to direct the business to the end goal.
This brings me back to letting go of control. In order to reach the end goal of almost any endeavor when you are the employer, you have to absolutely have to relinquish the minutia of daily projects and trust your employees to get it done. As an example, my first hire for Tiger Sheep was Steve, whose skill set was completely complementary in nature with no real overlap making it easy. I didn’t have to give up any responsibilities except those I was clearly not qualified to be handling. This state of business worked great at first but like all businesses hope to do, we grew and our project load increased to the point where I was becoming a real bottleneck. This bottlenecking is a symptom within the business that usually means it is time to start giving up some responsibilities, and if you have been following my previous posts you already know that to relieve some of the bottleneck I hired Nathan.
The trick, though, to having Nathan be an effective crewmember is to let him do his job and to not micromanage. This is the step where a lot of business owners fail, they cannot let their employees make mistakes or find their own solutions to problems. As anyone who has worked under a micromanager can attest, it is typically not a pleasant experience and ultimately leads to one of two outcomes: either the employee gets fed up and quits, or the employer feels they have to check and redo everything anyway and lets the employee go. Ultimately I have to trust my people to do the jobs they were hired for so that none of us go mad and the business can thrive. As I have been able to trust Nathan after verifying his work every few days just to make sure our visions are reasonably in sync, it has freed up my time to focus on my other tasks more fully, and ultimately the business is doing better with development humming along. Art is no longer waiting on projects to get past my bottleneck, and SAP projects are getting a cleaner, more focused response since I don’t have any nagging concerns about development holding me up.
