Once you’ve started with your own company, it’s difficult to delegate tasks. After all, this is something that you’ve created, and handing your vision over to someone else isn’t easy to do. Before you start delegating tasks, however, you should realize that some things shouldn’t be delegated. Here are a few tasks and responsibilities that you should never delegate to your employees.
The Hiring Process
It’s tempting to delegate the task of hiring new employees to other employees, especially when you’re on a hiring spree. Some managers even have employees interview potential employees as part of their day-to-day operations. This should never be done unless you have a trusted staff of managers and/or a professional human resources department.
Otherwise, only you should be a judge as to what’s right for your company. You know what you need and the type of person you’re looking for. Keep in mind that new hires are literally shaping the way the company will end up, so it’s important to choose the people that are a right fit for the company.
Your Company’s Brand Message
When it comes to marketing your business, you need to make sure the right message is getting out. If you get an outsider’s opinion, they’re going to tell you that everything you love about your company’s image is wrong, it’s not catering to a certain market, and you need to fix it. Don’t listen to them.
This is your company, this is your project, and you know what you love. The branding choices should be made by you and you alone. You should always be welcome to seeing your company’s brand from other people’s perspectives, but everything that changes should be a decision that you should make.
The Overall Vision of the Company
The vision of the company is something that was set by you from the very beginning. No one should ever interfere with that. The CEO should constantly stress the goals and vision of the company.
Any company that doesn’t have a goal will move in an aimless direction and will quickly crumble, especially in this economy. The employees should know your goals and visions for the company and support them in their work.
The Quality of Your Product
Once you’ve got a fully staffed workplace, it may be difficult to get around to everything, but you should never delegate the quality of your product. You should inspect your product personally. Never assign someone else to go through graphs and reports, you need to task yourself with checking on the quality frequently. Only you know how you want things to be, so it’s up to you to do just that.
Workflow automation software and having checks and balances in place reinforces efficiency and quality among your employees. You won’t have to worry about anyone missing deadlines on projects or missing documents again. This will take a great deal of stress off of everyone involved.
The Financial Choices Your Company Makes
It’s almost necessary to have an accountant to help with all of the day-to-day finances of the company. It’s completely fine to trust them with the information and reporting the information, but anything related to financial expenses should be done by you.
You are solely responsible for the finances in your company. A few bad decisions could send your company into a tailspin. Don’t allow someone else to easily tank your vision.
Investments in New Projects
It’s important, as the owner, that you foster an environment that promotes innovation. You want your people thinking outside of the box to create new and interesting products for the company. When it comes down to it, though, you need to be the one that makes the choice as to which ideas your company funds.
The things that your company comes up with are the things that will drive the company’s success. You don’t want someone else investing your money into an idea that you don’t believe in.
The Firing Process
This is the part that no one wants to do, and thankfully, they don’t have to — but you do. The decision to fire someone isn’t an easy one, but sometimes, it’s necessary. If there’s one employee with a bad attitude, the bad attitude can spread like wildfire among the other employees. When an employee has to be let go, it’s best that the boss does it.
If there’s any issue that the employee has on their mind, they can vent their frustrations, and the CEO can let them know when and where things went wrong. They can then ask the employee what they could possibly do to better the business. That way the company can potentially implement changes to make other employees happier.
It’s okay to delegate some tasks, but some things are just way too important to delegate. What are some tasks that you frequently delegate? Are there any that you refuse to delegate?
I am an entrepreneur. I grew from zero to 300 employees and revenues north of $30M.
You need to teach your leaders how to hire their employees. Of course you are not going to delegate hiring of your own, direct subordinates. But you need to empower your leaders to hire their own team. In the same way, they need to be empowered and responsible to fire those that are not performing. Some times you will need to push them to make the move.
The quality of the product must be part of the vision, but has to be delegated. You are too blind to see the problems in what your baby creates. You need a QA team, you need to survey your customers, you may need an outsourced QC company.
When it comes to new projects, you should trust your team! Spare money for new projects and let them handle. Of course you will decide to put more money on what you want, but you need to leverage your teammates ideas. If you see everything through your glasses and kill every other initiative, you are not leveraging the extraordinary capabilities of your team.
And finally. The first thing you need to delegate is your checking book! You are an entrepreneur because you have a passion for a particular subject, and it surely that’s not keeping your books or paying your bills. Find someone you can trust and delegate all that crap. You will have more time to focus on your passion, visit customers to sell them your products/services and grow your company.
Truth be told, finding and retaining talent is one of the toughest and certainly crucial tasks for an entreprenuer. Two of the 7 tasks are related to that! One has to really drill down to get the best talent from the pool of candidates.
Secondly, I think it goes without saying, as an entreprenuer, you have the vision, you came up with it to begin with, you know it inside out and you are the best person to spread the message. Alas delegating/outsourcing that would be recipe for a downfall!
Good point on retention. Hiring the right people is tough, but keeping top talent can be even harder.
I couldn’t agree more that those 7 responsibilities shouldn’t be delegated for a good long long long time. There will come a time when it’s not possible for the founding entrepreneur to cover all of these responsibilities and that is when still holding the reins on the overall vision of the company is so very important.
Yeah people can have varying perceptions of the same things which can really throw off an entrepreneurs vision if too much is outsourced too early on. It’s not easy finding responsible and creative people who see eye to eye on a lot of topics.
Even if these things are vetted through you I think there is a huge advantage. If you aren’t an expert in HR or Marketing, you could do your company some damage by taking all of these on yourself, but even so, having the decisions ran by you should be a necessity. You know the vision you have for your company best.
Yep. It isn’t always the most efficient to have to approve everything, but it can definitely avoid a lot of PR and R&D disasters. Start small and be cautious when hiring!
I know that one good way to free up more time for me and earn more would be to delegate some of the work. Still I’m pretty apprehensive about this, since my small trials showed me it’s not that easy to find reliable people to work with and I’d rather do the stuff myself than have to do it again after someone is messing up.
Delegation is hard and it can be quite a challenge to find responsible people as you’ve already experienced. It’s easy for people to sell themselves as superstars in the beginning but end up totally under delivering. It’s no wonder so many businesses have a probationary period when the first hire new employees!