Delegating Tasks So You Can Scale Fast

Scaling is the holy grail at the moment.

Everyone’s talking about how they can scale their businesses.

You can really scale a couple of ways… One is you can scale through using technology and automating processes and making things faster.

Or you can scale through people.

As a leader what you’re trying to do through scaling through your people is to get them to perform tasks at a quality that you would perform them.

If that quality remains consistent and they deliver a service at the same quality that you would, you get a good outcome. If they don’t, and you don’t delegate that task well, the service isn’t performed well and ultimately it costs your reputation and also the business’.

I’m going to share with you a way that you can delegate tasks so that you can scale quickly at a quality that maintains customer expectations, so that ultimately you look good.

This framework is for scaling and getting leverage in your business so that people that you work with can perform tasks and services at the same quality that you would do them, and you can trust them to deliver time after time.

There’s a couple of mistakes people make that have influenced my thinking.

The first mistake that people make is they don’t explain the why. They don’t explain why a task or a service that someone needs to perform is important, they don’t share the big picture of what comes before it, what comes after it, why we do it in the business, what happens if this task doesn’t happen?

So people don’t know, and they don’t have the motivation for how it fits into the big picture and what it essentially means for the business.

So the first point is in delegating something well is making sure you explain the why.

Then we move to the what. There’s two pieces to the what. The first is people make the mistake of describing the output they want, so… this is the level of relationship they’re looking for, the level of conversation they’re looking for, the piece of work, the document they want produced and they describe that document or they describe that relationship or they describe what to say.

Now the output’s important, but even more important than the output is the outcome. And if you can describe the outcome clearly, and why someone needs to do it, the interesting thing is you don’t just get a repeated output they way you would want it, you also get to use someone’s initiative.

So that they can decide how they get the outcome, and ultimately they might do it differently to how you do it.

The third piece is how you get scale. And you do that not by describing again how you would do it step by step but you’ve got to give someone the recipe. What is the actual methodology, the stages that someone would go through to produce the outcome and the output.

So that they can repeat it at the same level of quality each time.

So to summarise, one of the mistakes people make is when they’re delegating the task they don’t explain the why Always start with the why. Why this task is important, how it fits into the big picture.

The second mistake is that people describe the output they want and not the outcome. And if you can describe the outcome of what you’re after each time, people over time can use their initiative to maybe even do it differently and get that outcome quicker.

And the third is, with all the tasks you want to delegate, write down the recipe. Write the thing that you learned over years and years and years of what works to get that task done, and share with them that recipe so that they can use that recipe over and over again to scale.

If you do this well you’re more likely to scale quickly, and you’re more likely to delegate tasks in a way that leads people to feeling motivated to do them, to being able to use their own initiative, and to be able to scale faster than they do at the moment.

What I want you to do is think about something that you want to delegate to someone else, and have a go at explaining the why, what and how and leave me a message below:

What have you seen as a result?

In terms of their ability to do this task, the quality that they do it, and the smile on their face.

Talk to you next time on The Reason & The Road.