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We’ve noticed that many small businesses are limited by the manager’s immediate ability to accomplish more – often most or all of the work flows through the manager and the business can only grow as fast as the manager’s ability to handle it.
Of course, one way to address this is to hire staff and delegate tasks effectively (see further down) but another way is to help the manager get more done.
Time Log Worksheet
How do you actually spend your time, when you are working? Are you often “on the tools”, managing your people, farting about or do you actually (honestly) spend enough time developing your business?
Use this tool to assess yourself – it might come as a surprise! Once you’ve completed it, think about things you can do to change that balance and help you spend more time on the things that are important (rather than urgent!).
(If you want to discuss this, you know where we are!)
Time Log Worksheet
Groundhog Week
It’s a simple enough concept – pre-allocate your days to specific activities or specific regions. This helps you do things in blocks and reduce travel time or keep your focus on similar activities. It can make your days much more productive.
Use the table to block out parts of your week (or your fortnight or your month) and then, when you book meetings or tasks into your week, fit them into this framework. For example, Tuesdays in the city means you always try to book your city meetings or jobs on Tuesdays. It will stop you firing around driving back and forth across town. It works equally well if you allocate Tuesdays to working on the office on the business or to business coaching (as I do).
Groundhog Week
Delegating and Managing
It’s a truth that the way to get ahead in business is through leverage – that is where you make profits from the labour of others. These people are usually called staff and they come with a myriad of issues and complications! We aren’t even going to try to address them here but we will mention that many business owners continue to try to keep hold of everything themselves, despite having capable and willing staff. Often it is an unwillingness to “let go” or to trust someone to do a job. Phrases like “it won’t get done properly” are heard.
If you want to grow beyond your immediate ability to deal with everything – which is limited – you need to learn to trust your staff and to delegate more than just the easy work to them. You need to do it and you need to manage them properly – which is something else that business owners often neglect – the need to manage people rather than just point them at work and hope they do a good job.
The three tools below will help you delegate and manage more effectively. The first two are simple explanations of how to delegate and how not to ignore your responsibility for managing your team. The third is called the functional analysis. It shows the functions that exist in a generic business – you should alter it to reflect your business. Then you should write the names of those responsible for each function in the boxes. Only one name in each (or who is accountable?). That’s the first job; give each responsibility to one person. Second, note how many of the names are yours; I bet it is a big number.
Try to identify tasks or responsibilities that you can delegate to someone else – do it one at a time, don’t try to do them all at once. Then read the delegation sheet and off you go. If you get stuck, you know where we are!
Company Structure
Delegation
Management
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