The secret to effective delegation

Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! We’re going to be talking about delegation. For some people, this is a dirty word. It’s the thing that they want to figure out how to master, but it’s also the thing that stresses them out a lot. So if you don’t know how to delegate, listen up.

Today we want to talk about a couple of things that I commonly hear from people who are at that stage in their business where they’re trying to scale, where they’re trying to hire, but they don’t know what the next step is or really how to go about doing it.

I just want you to sit, think and ask yourself this question… Does this sound like you, or have you said this before? “I’m afraid if I delegate it, the quality of my services will go down”, or “it’s easier to just do it myself”, or “I’m the only one that can do this”, or “I don’t have time to stop and train somebody on everything that I do.”

Okay. Those are big fat lies.

❌ I don’t have time to delegate to someone else. I need help! (this is counterintuitive to say I need help but say you don’t have time to take the steps to get the right help in place)

❌ I don’t even know where to begin or what I could delegate.

These are common things that people say. If you are saying these things in your business and you’re at that point of trying to scale and hire, you are not alone.

Many business owners that have come before you have said the same thing, so that’s why today I’m going to outline a couple of points to help you to be able to delegate or hire somebody so that you can delegate. I created an exercise called the ‘delegation exercise‘, which is available for free download. This PDF is fillable so it can be fluid and easily updated with you as your business grows.

Let’s break down what this involves and how you can use it to actually figure out how you can start to delegate in your business…

We have this exercise broken down into actions.

The first action is that you need to brain-dump all of your tasks by category. Now that seems huge when you just think about it like that, but when you break it down to when you do certain tasks, you’re going to be able to see certain tasks that you’re actually doing and what someone else could do if they had the proper training.

This is going to help people who feel like, “Okay, I don’t even know where to begin or what I can hand off to someone else”, or “I’m the only person that can do all of these things”.

Starting with brain-dumping your task by category, we’re going to talk about daily things that you do, so list the tasks that you do on a daily basis, whether you think you can delegate them or not.

List them out and then go down to weekly. Then biweekly, monthly, quarterly, and, annually or even semi-annually basis. Once you have all of these tasks broken down like that, you’re going to be able to see, “Okay, so some of these things are actually repeatable”, right?

These are things that occur multiple times a year, a month and a week that I could get off my plate and free myself up.

Then you also want to think about other tasks, like those one-off or as-needed tasks that you have in your business. Maybe you’re not doing them on a regular, recurring basis, but there are things you could do more than once. Just brain-dump them and list what they are directly into the Delegation Exercise PDF.

The second action that you’re going to take is from that list that we’ve just created, you can ask yourself, “What do I absolutely need to keep, what do I need to do? What can possibly be delegated and what could be automated?”

Now, you may not know the answer to all of those questions, but just run through the exercise and see what comes up for you. Decide what tasks you absolutely have to do AKA no one else can handle them for you. Then, take a look at what tasks you see that someone else with proper instructions or training could do if you delegated it to them. Next, see what could be automated.

Possibly brainstorm by using your project management tool and your CRM tool. In thinking about those things, what could possibly be automated using those services? Now you may not know what all the automations are that are available, but if you do know, then that’s something that could possibly be automated into that category.

For example, I use (and love) ClickUp as my project management tool. I use some of the automations and I use a lot of the workflows. Then when there’s something that isn’t within one of those tools, automatically, I need to know that. So from there, you put these items either into your master list or actually put them into your project management tool.

Now I can see who I could actually delegate these tasks to, or who needs to be my first or next hire according to what kind of tasks or brackets these tasks fall into. If you want that Delegation Exercise to simplify that process for you, here’s the link again.

Some questions that I’ve heard before about this subject are along the lines of how you actually go about delegating this to a responsible team member or to the correct team member. Once you’ve gone through this list, you can kind of organize the tasks into certain subsections.

If some are marketing tasks and some are admin or data entry tasks or Tech VA type of tasks, organize them into these blocks, and then you can see either people who are already on your team who could take these things off of your plate or if you are looking for just a general assistant that might do a little bit of everything or somebody specific that you’re seeing that you need to hire, you’re going to have those answers. Doesn’t that feel good?

From this point, I highly recommend starting by documenting the process. You can start by at least creating a video. That video does need to be documented into an SOP at some point (standard operating procedure) that can later be updated if that task changes hands or the way that the task is carried out changes because, let’s be honest, platforms and softwares and the way that we do things change over time.

Start by building those SOPs but in the very least, start by recording your process while you’re doing it. This isn’t wasting time. You’re actually recording it while you’re doing the thing. Once you actually have SOPs written out, then I love to connect those with my project management tool, in my case, ClickUp.

Now, I’m not saying that you absolutely have to have the SOPs first before you can assign something in the project management tool. That’s not necessarily the case. It’s just best practice in my own view. If you already have a project management tool and right now you don’t have the time to do the documentation, then absolutely you can start adding those kinds of tasks, especially recurring tasks, into something like ClickUp or Asana, whatever tool that you might currently have.

So if you have questions about what that looks like or if you’re like, “Yes, I want and need to get this done, I want to get SOPs created, I want to figure out how to get things set up in my project management tool, or set up my project management tool”, we offer services for a lot of what we’ve discussed today. For our SOP manuals – we offer a VIP day style or we custom-create packages for larger organizations.

We also specialize in ClickUp project management setup, too. Delegating and hiring and being able to manage your teams, SOPs, and ClickUp project management tools really go hand in hand. Being able to take action and make that happen is a process.