Effective Guide to Delegating your task with Virtual Assistants as a Start-up Business owner
Every entrepreneur faces a time in his life where the business tasks become too impossible to be handled by an individual hand. The success of every entrepreneur depends on his/her ability to prioritize and therefore at some point it becomes a habit to hire a helping hand, which will take care of low priority tasks so that the entrepreneur can handle the high priority work and take the business ahead.
Entrepreneurs who try to tackle everything on their own from responding to emails, attending meetings, updating social media account to handling clients end up working poorly on all these tasks. Therefore, to enable each task to be performed well, he/she must acquaint him/herself with the art of delegation. In such a situation, it is important to know the tasks that need to be delegated to a virtual assistant.
In every manager’s workload—particularly new managers—there are likely tasks that you should do and tasks that you should delegate.
Career and business strategist Jenny Blake recommends conducting an audit of your tasks using the rules below to find out which of your tasks should be delegated:
Small: Small tasks are little things that only take a small amount of time to complete but add up over time. These might be things a personal assistant could do: scheduling meetings, booking flights for business trips, or deleting spam/marketing emails from your inbox.
Tedious: Tedious tasks are mindless tasks, such as copying and pasting lead information from your marketing automation tool to your CRM. Tedious tasks require tiny skills and can be easily delegated.
Time-consuming: Time-consuming tasks are opportunities to break work into smaller chunks and delegate parts of the work to others. If you perform a task regularly that takes a lot of time, look for opportunities to hand off segments of that task to others.
Teachable: Do you have tasks on your plate that you could easily teach someone else to complete? If a task is entirely teachable—if it does not require expertise that only you can provide—it’s a worthwhile candidate for task delegation.
Terrible at: Maybe you have no design skills, so it takes you six times as long to create graphics for your blog posts as it would a professional designer. It’s better to delegate that task to someone who’s more equipped to do the work fast and well.
Time-sensitive: Maybe it would be better if you handled all of the tasks belonging to a time-sensitive project, but if you won’t have time to complete it doing it all on your own, it’s time to find ways to delegate parts of that task to other members of your team.
Additionally, you may need to consider delegating tasks you love doing but are no longer part of your job.
If you recently moved into a leadership role, you may have pet projects from your days as an individual contributor, but if it’s now someone else’s job to complete those tasks, it’s time to delegate and teach that assistant how to do it for you.
How to Delegate Tasks Effectively
Here are a few tips to help you delegate effectively so that your team shares the workload and makes progress that benefits everyone.
1. Choose the right person for the task
2. Explain why you’re delegating
3. Provide the right instructions
4. Provide resources and training
5. Delegate responsibility *and* authority
6. Check the work and provide feedback
7. Say thank you
The Benefits of Learning to Delegate
If you delegate well, you can increase trust and commitment with your staff, improve productivity, and make sure the right people are performing the tasks that best suit them.
