If you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, you probably know how hard it is to let go of the reins. Failing to appreciate the importance of delegation, however, is going to cause your business to stagnate.
Simply put, you can’t do everything yourself. No matter how much you want to. No matter how hard it is to trust someone else to get it right.
If you are caught up in every little operation of your business, that is time and energy that you aren’t spending scaling it. It’s time that you should be doing the stuff that only you can do, rather than the stuff that someone else could take care of.
Why Delegation Is So Hard
If you have trouble outsourcing your work to someone else, you’re not alone.
A survey of business leaders conducted by Stanford University found that almost 36% of CEOs think that they need to improve their ability to delegate, while a similar percentage reported actively trying to get better at delegating.
Here’s the problem: generally, when you delegate a task, you still bare responsibility if it doesn’t go well. If you outsource your article writing, you’re the one who suffers if the content isn’t up to snuff. If you delegate an assistant to manage your schedule, you’re the one who gets embarrassed when you’re double booked.
The other thing that makes delegation so hard is the loss of control. You know that you can do the job, so why let someone else do it instead? You know that you’ll get it right, so why give someone else a chance to get it wrong?
In the end, grasping the true importance of delegation means finding a way to trust in the ability of others to succeed just as much as you trust yourself.
The Importance of Delegation To Business Growth
Outsourcing work to a team is vital for any business to grow. Facebook wouldn’t be where it is today if Mark Zuckerberg insisted on writing every line of code himself. The importance of delegation to a business manifests itself in a number of ways.
Delegation frees up time for strategy. If you are swamped in the the day-to-day activities of your business, you’ll struggle to find the time and energy it takes for strategic planning.
Once others are managing the menial tasks, though, you can focus on the aspects that allow your business to scale. Things like analyzing performance data, planning future endeavors, and researching your market.
Delegation empowers your team. Believe it or not, trusting someone else to work for you actually has psychological benefits for them. One study found that being delegated a task led to an increased sense of empowerment.
In essence, you are telling someone “yes, I trust you to do this right”. So, the more you can outsource to your team, the more confident they will be. And more confidence leads to better performance.
Delegation improves your leadership skills. If you have your heart set on changing the world through your business (even just your own little pocket of the world), you need to be a leader.
One of the hallmarks of leadership is knowing when to pass the torch. Every little task you can delegate to others doesn’t just free up your time, it provides authentic practice in being a good leader.
>> Don’t miss: How To Hire Freelancers the Right Way <<
3 Tasks You Really Should Be Outsourcing
Hopefully, you grasp the importance of delegation. There are only so many hours in the day. So if you don’t figure out how to share responsibility, you will eventually hit a wall that simply prevents your business from growing anymore.
When you are ready to start assigning work to others, here are three tasks that you should consider outsourcing.
Content Creation
Content marketing provides one of the highest returns on investment of any advertising strategy. It builds your brand, attracts new customers, and increases the loyalty of your existing audience.
However, it also takes time. A lot of time.
As a business leader, you simply can’t invest hours every day to write blog posts, shoot videos, design infographics, or create any of the other value adding content that customers will love.
You have the industry knowledge to know what direction your content marketing strategy should take. But you can save so much time by finding a trusted freelancer or two that can handle the actual content creation.
Web Design and Maintenance
Unless you run a web design agency (and maybe even if you do), you should consider letting someone else create and maintain your website.
Your website is going to be the first impression for anyone who finds you online. It needs to be professionally designed just like a brick-and-mortar storefront.
While there are a lot of straightforward website builders available for anyone to use, they tend to make the process look simpler than it really is.
If you can hire someone with a trusted portfolio of solid web design experience, odds are that your site will load faster, provide a better user experience, and attract more visitors than if you did the job yourself.
Customer Service
Once any business grows to a certain size, the constant influx of customer inquiries, complaints, and issues is going to be more than you can keep up with.
Having dealt with plenty of clients yourself, you should be able to train a virtual assistant to take the reins easily enough. Essentially, they’ll serve as a gatekeeper to resolve the low-level customer issues so that you only need to be called in on the ones that truly merit your attention.
Start Delegating To An Awesome Team of Freelancers on Legiit
If you’ve made it this far, we hope you have developed an appreciation for the importance of delegation for your business.
When you first start out, it’s easy enough to make it as a one man band. But eventually, you’ll want to begin outsourcing tasks so that you can focus on growth and scale.
Legiit connects entrepreneurs and business owners to the freelancers they need every single day. Check out what they’re offering and start building your team today.
Download