Learning to delegate work, who you can trust most, and writing down your processes and procedures is one of the hardest parts of running a business or a team.
We all have this instinct to do it yourself or else it won’t get done right.
Don’t let the fear of delegation stop you from growing your business and improving your team. Once you get your task management system down, your SOPs written, and your team trained, your business will run like a well-oiled machine!
In this post, we will touch on why delegation is scary, how software like OrbitalWP can help, and how you can get better at managing your workload. Lets dive in!
Why “I’ll Just Do It Myself” Backfires
Ideas like “If you want it done right, do it yourself” or “I can do it faster myself” are the most self-defeating patterns in management.
Explaining a task to one of your employees can be much harder and take longer than doing the task yourself. Most managers skip the teaching part and just do the work. It feels efficient. But it only feels that way because you’re only focusing on today. If you don’t learn to delegate some of the workload, you’ve built a system that depends entirely on you.
The first time you explain it, it’s slower. Every time after that, it’s faster. Most leaders give up right before it starts paying off. They delegate once, mistakes are made, and they decide delegating doesn’t work.
The Fix: Turn the Task Into an SOP
So what is the solution?
Don’t just explain the task. Write it down. Turn the work into a living procedure, a standard operating procedure (SOP), that spells out how the task gets done and what “done right” looks like.
Now you’re not re-explaining the same task every time it comes up. You hand someone the SOP, they follow it, and the standard stays the same even when you’re not the one doing the work.
You stop touching every task yourself. You set the standard once, and the system handles the rest.
Now you need a place to put that system to work.
Get the Work Organized and Visible with OrbitalWP
That’s what OrbitalWP is built for. Here are the steps covered in this part of the article:
- Create your tasks
- Interact with them on the Kanban
- See the work over time on the Gantt chart
- Link task to your SOPs
- Assign the work to the right person
- Approvers review and approve the work
- Ship it to the client or stakeholder
The first step is creating all your tasks inside OrbitalWP. Now your tasks are real and they exist in a database, not in an email or a text message.
Now you can see all of these new tasks on the Kanban board. You can filter the Kanban by priority, assignee, status, all in one place. No guessing who is working on what.
If you enter start and due dates on your tasks, you can see how your tasks overlap in time. This will help you spot bottlenecks in your team’s workload. Or, you might see a week where nothing is scheduled and a high priority task could be moved to that time slot.
Make Sure the Work Gets Done Right
Visibility isn’t enough on its own. You also need to know the work was done to standard.
Link your standard operating procedures directly to your tasks. This will help the assignee understand exactly what the expectations are for the task. They do the work and then mark it complete.
Now assign the tasks to the right team member.
The approver will review the work and sign off by marking it “approved.”
Now you can ship the work to the stakeholder or client with confidence it was done right.
Keep Tightening the System
Will there be small issues that pop up? Yes. That’s where the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle comes in. Review the work, study the problems, update the SOPs, and tighten up your workflow. Then do it again.
But remember, you can’t run PDSA cycles without your processes written down somewhere for your team to easily access them.
Conclusion
It is hard to find new clients and win bids. When you land that new project, you will do whatever it takes to make sure the work meets your standards and the client is happy.
You don’t have to do it alone. Build a team of reliable individuals, train them, teach them, and let them take some of the work off your plate.
Write down your processes, link them to the tasks, and show your team how to rely on them when you are out of office landing new clients!
That’s what OrbitalWP is built for. You already did the hard part, you landed new clients. Build the system, and you’ll keep them.