The Simple Guide to Delegation for Small Business

1. Start with the Aim

What’s the end goal here? Not the means to the end, but the end itself.

Careful of swaying into the method here - filling in a spreadsheet is never the end goal.

For example, here at SquareFish we are about to start researching which industries we should target for a new business of ours. It offers drone inspection services for anything that’s difficult to access. That’s a fairly broad spectrum, so we better narrow our target markets down a bit. Let’s use that as our example task.

For our example task:

Aim:
Identify and rank all the industries we should be targeting.

That’s a good aim. It tells us everything about what we are trying to achieve, whilst saying nothing about the means to achieve that. Perfect.

2. Consequences

How important is this task to the business? What are the consequences if done well / poorly?

Sharing the importance of the task helps your team judge the speed vs quality balance they have to strike in every job.

For our example task:

Consequences:
Getting this right is critical. All our marketing will be based on this industry selection. If we target the wrong industries, it doesn’t matter how good our website is or how much we spend on marketing, it’ll not work.

3. What Resources can be used?

• Is this a job for just one person, or can they pull in colleagues?

• How many man-hours can they put in?

• What’s the budget here?

Any resources that can be used here should be clearly defined.

For our example:

Resources:
This task is just for you. Feel free to pick the brains of your colleagues for ideas on how to approach the task, but you should do all the work. I’d expect it to be about 4 days of your time all in.

4. Guidelines & Recommendations (optional)

Guidelines - rules they have to work within

Are there any fixed systems they have to work within? Perhaps a set format for the results that are required? These are the pre-set rules, they are not advice, they are instructions

In my experience it’s rare there are no guidelines. If you think you’ve none then perhaps you’ve just forgotten one.

For our example task:

Guidelines:
All info to be in Google Workspace, please. For every industry, we’d like to know the approximate market size and your score for how likely they are to buy our product.

Recommendations - just ideas if it helps

This is the section for “if I were you then I’d do this….”. Again optional, maybe you have no suggestions, or perhaps you don’t want to bias them with your suggestions.

Be aware these are suggestions only though, it should be entirely up to the person you are delegating to if they use these suggestions or not.

For our example task:

Recommendations:
I’d recommend the end result should be a list of all possible industries, with two simple scores:

• the market size (e.g. small, medium, large)

• how likely they are to buy our services (e.g. a score out of ten)

If I were you I’d start by looking at the rivals - whichever industries they put at the top of their lists are likely the ones they think are most important.

I’d also look at the “inspections” section of engineering consultancy firms - that should give us some ideas of what inspections are being outsourced.

5. Accountability

When should they report back to you, and how will they get credit for a job well done?

This should be set out as a positive, not a negative. Everyone likes fair acknowledgment for a job well done. This is your chance to make sure your team knows they’ll get the reward for a great job done.

Check-in Points

In our business, we normally aim for a few check-in points along the way, as well as how and when the final task should be presented.

If you want them to give you a quick 5-minute status update at the end of each week, now’s the time to plan that in.

Stop-Points

It’s absolutely fine to plan in stop-points too, where they have to check in with you before continuing any further. Great for more speculative tasks - go spend a day researching X, then we’ll chat and decide if it’s worth further investment.

Can they come to you in the meantime?

Generally, I always tell the team they can give me a call anytime if they’d like some advice or to run an idea past me. But maybe for your task, you do not want them to check in until the task is complete. If so, now’s the time to lay that out.

Agree on it, then stick to it

Once this is agreed upon, you have to stick to it.

You’ve agreed you’ll not ask, nor look-over-the-shoulder, until the first check-in point. I won’t lie, it can be awfully tempting to say “so, can I just see how you are getting on with…”, but any unwanted peering can be very demotivating.

For our example:

Accountability: First stop point would be after you’ve done all your planning, but before you start the actual research. Let’s chat through your plan before you start implementing it.

The next stop-point should be once you’ve collected all the data, but before you’ve analyzed and scored all the industries. Let’s make sure we are all happy with the scoring system you’ve designed before you then go and mark them all.

Then show the final results to the full team - it would be ideal to be there Friday afternoon.

The most common mistake small business leaders make?

Not agreeing on accountability at the start is the biggest mistake I see in small business delegation techniques.

A boss peering over the shoulder uninvited can be very demotivating, especially when they start giving unsolicited advice which are just things you already had on the to-do list anyway.

Planning accountability works best when the staff member designs the system here. Ideally, they should decide how and when their homework is marked.