How to shift from doer to delegator in your business
Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there. Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. Let’s talk about how you can shift from being a Doer to a Delegator in your business with an SOP manual.
The very first thing that I want to clarify, if you’re not familiar with the term SOP, is that SOP is short for Standard Operating Procedure. Now, if you’re still not familiar with what in the world Standard Operating Procedure means, an SOP is essentially a simple set of instructions for how to do a thing.
An SOP manual is your whole set of simple sets of instructions for how to do a thing. They should be clear, they should be concise, they should be comprehensive, and they should be very easy to follow. So when you hear me talking about SOPs and SOP manuals, that’s actually what we’re talking about.
Now that we have gotten that piece out of the way, (I do get questions on that often – especially from my friends in brick-and-mortar businesses), let’s talk about the subject at hand.
Shifting from being a doer to a delegator in your business can be challenging, to say the least, especially if you are used to being hands-on with every aspect of your business operations. One of the best ways to make this transition is by creating a Standard Operating Procedure Manual or, for short, an SOP Manual.
Here’s what the steps are that you can follow to create an SOP Manual that’s going to help you to delegate effectively: The first thing to this process is identifying what processes you’re actually doing, what tasks are critical in your business operations, what tasks or processes are being carried out on a regular basis, whether it’s daily, whether it’s quarterly, yearly, etc. and documenting what those things are to actually see what you’re doing in your business and what could possibly be delegated.
Before I go any further, I want to make sure that if you are not already signed up for our email series, you can do so by grabbing our freebie called the Delegation Exercise, and then hop onto our weekly email series to get more information and tips like these.
The Delegation Exercise is going to break this process down step-by-step. This first step helps you to start identifying what processes and tasks you need to delegate to others, and what items need to stay on your plate, and then takes you from that first step of just identifying what you have in front of you and then moving to our next step.
After you’ve identified what things you can hand off to somebody, then you need to break down these tasks into step-by-step instructions that can be easily understood by John Doe, who comes off the street and has no prior knowledge of your business.
Obviously, it’s super important to be as detailed as possible, including screenshots, including any little videos that you could embed into the document templates that would help your team members to complete the task in a more cohesive and organized way and not have to continue to reinvent the wheel every single time as well.
Every SOP should be developed in that way in a very detailed manner, not squirrel and scattered, which is the way that we tend to record videos or tutorials for people because we squirrel when we’re in front of a screen.
You need to be able to come out of the task that you’re doing and say, “Okay if I were a new person looking at this task, what information would I need? What would be the best way to help me to complete this task in a productive and effective manner?” From there, write it according to those thoughts and that exact thought process.
Now, talking about an SOP manual – the actual manual is all of your SOPs as a whole organized together. We actually like to create a spreadsheet or a database of SOPs and organize them by the groups that they belong in, whether it’s the departments or maybe the software that they belong to or the steps in the client process that those tasks belong in, and just figuring out the best way to organize those blocks of processes or sets of instructions so that that information is easier to locate and find.
Now, once you’ve gotten to this point, you have your SOPs and your organized SOP Manual created. Now you can effectively start to delegate to team members that are already existing in your organization, or team members that you’re newly onboarding and trying to train and bring up to speed as quickly as possible.
You’re going to be able to give them tasks in a really simple and straightforward way and help them to even work their way up to more complex tasks because you have everything already documented for them. So one thing is going to naturally flow into the next. This helps to set expectations and establish clear communication between team members, between you as a business owner and your team members, and making sure that everybody knows what their role and what responsibility is.
This SOP Manual will provide a really awesome environment for you and your team to work in, a lot less stressed and overwhelmed, and making it where you’re able to delegate these things and get them off your plate.
By following these steps and building out your SOPs and your SOP Manual, you can shift from being the doer to the delegator in your business, and then empower your team members to take on more responsibility, aka, get more off your plate. So this is going to help you to free up time to focus on more strategic aspects of your business on growth and planning and being the visionary in your business and doing the things that only you can do, rather than being so bogged down in the things that somebody else could be doing.
Make sure that you grab our Delegation Exercise freebie if you want to try and get started and see how this process works and figure out how to delegate those things out to somebody.
Book your session now and let us help you take your business to the next level and subscribe to our email series if you want to see our step-by-step process of how we develop those SOPs.
If you are to that point where you know you need SOPs, but you feel like you do not have the brain power or brain space to tackle developing SOPs, please shoot us a message and say, “I want more information on the SOP Manual VIP day.”
