Transcription
One of the most common complaints I hear from small business owners and entrepreneurs is they don’t have enough time to do the things that they want to do or the things they need to do to grow their business strongly into the future. They all of a sudden realise that they’re central to everything in the operation, and they’re feeling stuck. They know that if they’re not working on their business, nobody is. That business is not going to realise its potential as long as the business owner is central to it. Unfortunately, the more valuable a business owner is to their business, the less valuable that business will be. Often those business owners can tell you more about their problems than their potential. This business is not going to realise it’s potential unless something changes.
Now that might be something between the ears, some of the thinking, or it might be some strategies. Today I’d like to share with you two strategies to create more time, and they are two of seven strategies. I’ll tell you how to get the other five at the end of this video.
We’ve all heard about delegation, but delegation’s important, but facilitation is better. Today we’re going to talk about facilitation. But first, let’s think about how delegation works. Typically we have a plate, if you like our jobs that we have on our to-do list. That to-do list gets longer and longer, and often we don’t quite get to everything on it. We find ourselves looming closely to a deadline, and we’re going to need to either do it or delegate it.
Now, when we get to that point, we need to delegate it. We’re going to find somebody that we can delegate our tasks to. Then we’re going to hopefully not abdicate it when we delegate. We’re going to give them some training, give them some support, some supervision, some feedback and tell them a standard we’re after so that they can actually achieve it. Then we’re going to trust them to get on with it. That’ll be fine.
Then what happens is we get some more opportunities to delegate. So the process repeats. That’s not a permanent solution, and what we need to look at is something that’s going to be a permanent fix, not a quick fix because it’s a strategic issue; the fact that you can’t work on your business. We need a strategic solution to that, something that’s going to give us a longer term permanent fix. That’s where facilitation comes in.
How does that work? We need to, instead of delegating tasks, we need to delegate responsibilities and facilitate the situation that the person we’re going to delegate that to is capable of performing at a high level, just as we’d be happy with. Therefore we don’t need to be worried about that, and we can step up to work on the business more.
Here’s how I suggest you go about that. Get clear on your goals, the goals for the business, the goals for yourself and the goals for the team, the longer term goals, more strategic goals. Then look at your roles and responsibilities and the expectations you have from each of those roles. Then start with yourself. Get yourself a job description or a task list of all the responsibilities that you’ve got and tasks within those responsibilities and list those down and then ask yourself this question as you go through that list. What would be the worst that would happen if I didn’t do this task, if I didn’t take care of this responsibility? Often there’s a bit of resistance because you’re in the habit of doing it, and you’ve got this fantasy belief that you’re the only person that can do it to the right standard. If that is the case, well, that’s a problem that you’ve got with the leadership and training and development to be honest.
We need to lift our level a little bit and do something about that. We need to find somebody or some people that we can delegate those responsibilities to not just tasks because we don’t want those tasks to come back. Once you’ve delegated responsibilities and done that well, so you’ve trained them and now you can trust them to perform well, they’re going to feel really good about that. You’re going to feel good too because you know that they can do that to a high standard. Now you’ve got the freedom, more time to go and work on the business and realising that potential that your business has.
The cool thing about this process is that you’ve learnt two things about don’t do lists, which is really important to say no to certain things, rather than just yes to everything because now you don’t have to be the chief problem solver all the time, and you can actually be more strategic and take that business forward. But also, we’re developing ourself, but we’re also developing our systems and processes to support our team. We’re getting some of the intellectual property out of our mind and hopefully into some sort of documentation, so now we’re actually starting to systemise our knowledge. Then we can streamline and standardise it. That’s a really strong formula to take a business forward, but enable the team to perform at their best as well.
There’s two strategies to create more time. There’s five more on the button below this video. If you click that, you’ll get those two and five more, as seven strategies to create more time. I’ve written those up for you and feel free to click that button, and we’ll email those to you. All the best with those two strategies in the coming week. I’ll see you again next time.