Creating the belief

A growing business will reach a point where one person can no longer do it all. The next step is to empower staff by giving them the confidence to take on projects by themselves...

If you want your business to move up to the next level then chances are you’re going to need to be less involved in everyday concerns and take the bold step to pass certain responsibilities on to other people.

The problem here is it requires an entrepreneur to embrace the dreaded ‘d’ word. That’s right: delegation. If you are serious about wanting to build a sizable business and to develop it quickly without the wheels coming off, then you need to learn the skills of empowerment and the first step to succeeding at this
is delegating.

Unsurprisingly, business leaders struggle with this as they are used to doing everything themselves and, even worse, keeping everything to them-selves. This means that, rather than delegating, which involves careful briefing and coaching, jobs are ‘dumped down’ on more junior people who are then left on their own.
For empowerment to be effective, you need to understand and embrace delegation: you need to give your staff total responsibility for a discrete area, knowingly giving them room to fail.

An intrinsic part of this process is to be surrounded by smart, quick and self-motivated people, ideally with complementary skills. Entrepreneurs who are frightened of hiring people this good are not going to make it. Besides, it’s not a high risk strategy at all – with such a team, if you keep them on the move and stretched with exciting challenges, they won’t have time to play politics. Of course, they will make mistakes and no, initially, they possibly won’t do things as well as you, but that’s the price of progress.

Don’t abdicate
Empowerment doesn’t mean abdicating all responsibility. This is your business and you have to protect it while giving others responsibility. You need to dip in and out of things. Check on how things are going. Ask if there are problems you can help with. It’s good to pose unexpected questions at unexpected times – you don’t want to be too predictable. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that you should be sneaky or deliberately disruptive.

Sometimes you may be uneasy with the answer – you don’t know it’s wrong, but you have a sense of unease. In that case, don’t drop the subject. Keep drilling down until you’ve found what you need to know. Your team must be allowed to handle things differently, but you will, for example, have very clear ideas on how staff and clients should be treated and you certainly won’t want that to change.

Next page