Delegation for the resistant
Mark Plant
Business Growth Specialist and trouble shooter | NEC | Business Recovery | Turnaround Strategies
?A common problem amongst start-ups and early stage businesses is a founder who either believes that he can do everything himself or finds it difficult if not impossible to delegate responsibility within their business?? This is a very difficult problem to overcome , as a founder you no doubt had an unerring belief in your own ideas and your total faith in your own abilities. Let’s face it , without these you would probably never started the business in the first place and you would certainly have not got it to the position of needing additional management skills.?? But running a business is like being a parent, there comes a time when you have to accept that you can not provide everything that your child needs and its time to get other people involved in their development. With a child it is schooling and teachers and with a business ?it is getting other people involved and giving them at least some responsibility for the next stage in development.
?It is time to delegate, to relinquish the responsibility for different aspects of the business and to accept that someone else may do the job as good as you would and in some cases better.?? As a founder it is imperative that you recognise what you are good at and more importantly what you are not. I always tell my early stage business clients that if there is an area where they would not hire themselves for a particular role then the best thing to do is to go out and here the best that you can afford and let them do it.?? A word of caution make sure that you hire the right person from a capability and cultural fit perspective. This is far more difficult than it sounds but that is the subject of another article . Once you have made the appointed , make sure that they have a very clear brief, a set of mutually agreed ?objectives and a defined reporting structure ?BUT do not micro manage, will they make some mistakes - of course , will they do everything the way you would do it – of course not ?but give them the space and they may well surprise you.
?That being said , if they do not work out then do not be afraid to bite the bullet and get them out of the business, don’t be afraid that it will impact your credibility in , or indeed out of, ?the business a bad manager can do far more damage than a hit to your pride and it can be much longer lasting
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