The Art of Delegation

The Art of Delegation

The Art of Delegation 

Many business owners become bogged down by the admin and day to day management tasks that are involved with running their business.  A solution to this can be to outsource these to a Virtual Assistant or VA.  If this is something you’re considering then you need to make sure you brief them properly.

Sarah German is a VA,  and below she shares her top tips on working with a virtual assistant.

Before I became a Virtual Assistant, I successfully managed a small team of data analysts for a small financial services business. Back then, I worked with a business coach and one of his key messages to me, that I still keep at the forefront of my mind today, was, “don’t be afraid to ask for help”. There were many times when I felt overwhelmed, not just at work, but also with running the family home. There just always seemed to be too many things to do and never enough time to do them. For some reason or another, it never occurred to me that anyone could help me. I seemed to have invented my own rules that all the things I was trying to do were my responsibility and that everything needed to be done by me. The result: I made mistakes and I was stressed, because I couldn’t do everything on my to-do list or live up to my own high standards. So, when I get potential clients contacting me now, I totally get it and am honoured to be the one they are asking for help.

The story tends to unfold as follows: Person A starts a new business. They have a skill or trade that they have excelled in for a company and now they want to go it alone. They quickly realise that running a business involves being skilled at other things that they don’t have a great deal of experience in, nor the inclination to progress.  In the early days it’s fine, it’s all a journey of discovery and it makes sense to understand everything in the business. Person A is soon busy with clients and starts to let all those administrative and marketing tasks slide, quickly leading to a state of overwhelm. They need help. They need to delegate!

There are many benefits to delegating. For those that work alone in their business, this essentially means ‘outsourcing’: –

• It stops you procrastinating. We’ve all been there, finding excuses to put off the jobs you hate. Someone else can do it for you now. No need for any more excuses!
• Your productivity increases, which in turn, saves you time and money. You have more time to focus on your fee-paying clients. And what’s more, you get to skip the all-nighters or weekends spent catching up.
• You gain access to new skills. Never been great with Excel? You can bet there’s someone else out there that can save you hours of deciphering and unpicking.
• You can go back to focusing on the things you’re good at and the reasons you went into business in the first place.

As with everything, there is an art to successful delegation. In my home, I have delegated the loading and unloading of the dishwasher to my 11-year-old. It hasn’t been an instant success. Why? Because he didn’t receive clear instructions and was expected to understand the art of arranging plates, pots, pans and dishes with no prior experience, no qualifications and no motivation (we decided not to pay him for day-to-day household chores. Is that mean?).

So, before you delegate, it’s worth taking the time to assess exactly what needs doing and how long it takes. The latter helping you to assess the value of your delegation by understanding the value of the time you will save. The former will enable you to provide clear instructions to someone on how and when you would like something to be done. Once you’re clear about that, it’s time to look for someone to help. Armed with your task list, you can use those keywords to search (usually) LinkedIn and narrow down a candidate with the skills you require.  Ideally you will want to work with someone who has been recommended to you by a trustworthy connection, if not then check out recommendations on their website and make sure they are insured, qualified and affiliated with appropriate organisations. Virtual Assistants for example, must fulfill certain professional criteria (including insurance) before they can become an approved member of the Society of Virtual Assistants, so the inclusion of their logo on a VA website is a good sign.

But the most important aspect of delegation is the relationship between you and your delegate. Why? Because, for a successful collaboration, you need to be able to trust someone to do a good job and know that they have a good understanding of your goals. Often, it is better to work with someone that you know, like and trust and who is willing to learn, than someone who already has the requisite skills, but has a different mindset to you. Open communication is key, so if someone just doesn’t get you or what you’re trying to achieve, the collaboration is likely to falter or fail. Back at the 11-year-old and the dishwasher, well we’re still working on it!

Sarah German 

Sarah is a multilingual Virtual Assistant who loves to increase her clients’ productivity by doing the jobs they hate. She specialises in data management, customer support and social media management.  She is also a linguist and offers translation and transcription services from German, French and Spanish into English. With her varied background in customer services, merchandising and data management, Sarah tends to work with clients in the financial services and e-commerce sectors. She is very happy to work with any like-minded businesses that are passionate about their customers, have a sense of fun and a determination to be the best they can