Delegation is an essential leadership skill. Especially for growing businesses. As your client base and service offerings grow, you come face-to-face with the fact you can’t take care of everything on your own. You realize you need to start delegating and fast. If you don’t, you’ll either lose your business or burn out. And neither of those sounds appealing.
Gallup tells us that for every growing business that wants to move past the startup phase it needs a leader who knows how to delegate. Unfortunately, only one in four business leaders come with a natural-born flair for delegation. Which means most will have to learn the skill.
But where do you start? The first step is to surround yourself with people you trust. After that, it’s a matter of getting the right tools, and following these eight key tips to delegate tasks effectively, so you can achieve maximum productivity!
1. Use A Task Management Tool
The single most important way you can maximize efficiency in task delegation is by getting the right task management tool.
According to SoDa, 25% of creative agencies say adopting new methods and processes for working is a key strategic priority for investment. This is because inefficient processes waste valuable creative production time and resources.
Whether you run an in-office, hybrid, or fully remote business, task or work management software like ActiveCollab can boost efficiency, productivity and remove much of the confusion and miscommunication that happens when delegating tasks and managing workflows via emails.
Having one tool or platform for your entire agency operation, which lets you manage clients, and tasks, helps you:
- Speed up workflows – Because you can assign and reassign tasks with due dates quickly, as a team leader, you can half the time you spend delegating tasks each week. On the other hand, as a team member, you’ll have a clear log of items that need to be completed with their due dates, so you can prioritize tasks in the right order.
- Provide clarity – Most task management tools have labels that you can customize to your workflows. By getting your teams to label which stage of the task they are at, you can track the progress of work for each item in real time.
2. Choose The Best Person For The Job
Forbes says your ability to delegate effectively is directly reflected in your people’s productivity. So, if you want your team to deliver to the highest standards, you need to align tasks to strengths and passions. That way, not only do you increase the quality of your output, but you also keep your people happy, engaged, and thriving.
No,w there are two ways you can do this:
- Use your judgment – Most leaders know the strengths and weaknesses of their team members. The way you know this is through the results their work delivers.
- Let your people choose – The other thing you can try (especially if you want to identify rising stars in your team or help them develop and grow), is to let your teams choose their tasks based on what they perceive are their key strengths, but also their passions.
Something else to consider when choosing the right person for a task is their capacity. Another Forbes article tells us that only 5% of employees produce 26% of your total output. It’s important you know this and can recognize who your star performers are, so you don’t overwhelm them to burnout.
This can be a huge pain point, particularly for agencies who are stretched for resources because they need to meet competing demands and client deadlines. Many professional service automation tools like ActiveCollab, have a workload management feature that lets them see each of their team members’ availability and capacity.
3. Praise & Explain Why It’s Been Given To Them
Gallup tells us praise is one of the easiest yet least utilized strategies for boosting people’s performance. But what does this have to do with effective task delegation? Well, it’s another motivation technique. And, it’s one of the most powerful ways to inspire your people to do a job well done. However, the idea here is to praise the person before they start.
When you openly state that the task has been assigned to them because you, their leader, believe they have the right mix of skills and expertise to deliver the result you want, you boost their confidence. And in doing so, you instantly raise their level of dedication and desire to do well.
So, what you’re actually doing is using praise to rationalize the reason why you chose them for the job.
You can use praise in two ways when delegating tasks:
- Individual strengths – The first is to focus on how the task demands their unique skills, knowledge, and abilities.
- Value of task – The second is to explain the task’s importance or client value to the business, and in that way, indirectly show that by choosing them, you also know the value and indisputable worth of their input.
4. Provide A Clear Brief, Instructions & Resources
You know that old saying: If you want a job done right, do it yourself? Well, when delegating tasks, if you want them done right, you need to give a person the right kind of instructions.
This means providing a clear and detailed brief of what you expect them to deliver. It also means sharing any additional information, like business context or background information that will help, and influence effective decision making throughout the completion of the task.
However, just as important, is making that information easily accessible. And that means centralizing all the information onto one tool that is easy to use. To do that, most agencies and consultancies use a project or workflow management system like ActiveCollab.
So when delegating tasks, make sure you do three things during the briefing process:
- Centralize task information – All the information a task owner needs to complete the item of work should be housed in one central location. That way, even if the same task is reassigned to someone else, the newcomer will have everything they need in one place, and there won’t be a long handover process.
- Organize information – If the project or campaign is a large one, make sure all the reference documents and instructions are organized in a logical manner so they are easy to find. This might mean creating separate folders or notes with links to external materials.
- Give the opportunity for questions – Always give the task owner the opportunity to ask questions in case they are unclear about any of the instructions or any element of the brief.
ActiveCollab is an ideal solution for centralizing, organizing, and managing client and business workflow information and documents. Within the tool, you can create projects for individual clients or tasks and store all accompanying documents and resources. You can also hold remote team brainstorms and convert those discussions into tasks.
5. Set Achievable Deadlines
Some people work better under pressure and tight deadlines, others not so much. When you assign tasks, it’s vital you put some thought into the timeframe you give for completion. You need to ask: Is the due date I’ve set a reasonable one, and will it let the person deliver a quality outcome?
If you don’t set reasonably achievable deadlines, you’ll end up with a team that is driven to burn out, producing low quality work. And that’s not good for any kind of business.
If you want to avoid this scenario, there are two things you can do to make sure your team isn’t pushed beyond their limits, while, at the same time, making sure you meet client needs:
- Use data for due dates – Reporting data from productivity and time tracking tools can help you make more informed due date estimates. By looking back at how long a task took one of your team members to complete on a previous campaign, you can guide your delivery date decisions and come up with reasonably achievable dates for future tasks.
- Split tasks – If you’re on a seriously tight deadline for a key client and you know the work is impossible to deliver at the quality you need by one person, you can break down tasks in more manageable pieces and share them across several team members.
Through our time tracking features, ActiveCollab users can not only track time, but also compare estimated vs. tracked time records to identify tasks that didn’t meet deadlines. You can then use this data to make better due date estimates. Also, within each project, you can use the sub task feature to split a piece of work into smaller chunks, which can be assigned to more people.
6. Check-In Regularly & Offer Support
According to HBR, regular check-ins are vital if you want to make sure your people have everything they need to do their job. This theory also applies to delegated tasks for hybrid, remote, and in-office teams. This is not micromanaging – it’s monitoring progress and providing support to help keep your team members on track.
By touching base with your team members often and asking them how they are moving along, you can:
- Identify and manage burnout – When you openly ask and offer support, people are much more likely to speak up. Usually, the people who are at risk of burnout are too busy and stressed to even notice. And that’s where you come in as the manager who checks-in on them regularly.
- Help remove blockers – Another question you should make a habit of asking is if there are any blockers you can help remove. These could be bottlenecks or things sitting in another person’s remit that are causing unnecessary delays.
With ActivCollab, project managers and team leaders can view and monitor all assigned tasks through the people and resources workload dashboard. This means you can quickly spot anyone who seems like they are struggling with their delivery items, as well as those who seem to be taking it easy. That way, you can jump in quickly to manage and reassign tasks, before small issues become full-blown delays. This also helps you potentially manage employees who might be at risk of resigning due to increased stress and overwhelming workloads.
7. Promote Autonomy & Accountability
When you delegate work, the idea is to hand over ownership of the task entirely. However, some workplaces and managers struggle with this concept, and they focus too much on hand-holding their team. This completely defeats the purpose and benefits of delegation.
In these cases, what you get is a task that has in theory, been handed to someone else but still has you, the leader, in the driving decision-making seat. That is not delegation. It’s micromanaging, which isn’t good for team engagement, employee morale, or business performance.
For employees, this way of working can be frustrating and demotivating. So much so that according to PWC, nearly half of employees would give up a 20% raise, for more control over how they work.
So, how do you promote autonomy and encourage accountability? In two simple ways:
- Build trust and let go – If you trust and know your people, you should be able to let them run with the task or project without too much of your direct input. Give a detailed brief, tell them what you expect the output to look like, let them ask questions, and send them on their merry way. If you hound them with constant check-ins and instructions, you waste valuable time and energy on both sides.
- Communicate clear roles and responsibilities – To empower your teams to accountability, you need to be crystal clear, and direct about what you expect them to deliver, do, or manage. Having an open discussion, where you both come to an agreement on what their role and responsibilities are, will empower them to drive a successful outcome.
8. Give & Seek Feedback
If you want to keep optimizing your workflows, you need to improve your daily processes continuously. For task management, this means giving and seeking feedback on how the team can manage delegation better.
Now, this doesn’t have to be any official process or an additional meeting task. Collecting and evaluating learnings can be done in two simple ways:
- Add learnings to an existing meeting – Add a discussion item for key learnings and process improvements to an existing team meeting. This shouldn’t take more than 5-10 minutes, where you quickly share ideas on more productive ways to work together.
- Set up a learnings document – The other option is to set up a learnings document and ask all your team members to add improvement ideas, which the team can implement each month.
While small changes in operations may seem trivial, once you add them up, they can save the entire business a whole lot of hours and effort, which can be put to better use in creative work.
Benefits Of Delegating Tasks For Leaders & Founders
Task delegation brings benefits to the entire organization. But the people who benefit most from it are leaders and agency founders. Not only does it create more time in their day for strategic activities that help them run the business more efficiently, it also helps grow and expand their service offerings.
As a leader or agency founder, some of the main reasons why you’ll want to delegate more tasks out are to:
- Identify and manage priorities – Your to-do lists are forever growing. The only way to sift through them, and work out what really requires your attention, and what can be handed over, is to apply a prioritization method. Techniques like the MoSCoW method, Eisenhower matrix, or the GTD method, are all useful frameworks that teach you how to prioritize tasks like a pro. Once you are clear on your priorities, it will be much easier to work out which tasks can be delegated and which ones need to be done by you.
- Boost collaboration & innovation – For creative agencies, collaboration and innovation are the ultimate drivers of their success with clients. When you delegate tasks out and give opportunities to different people in the team to try out different tasks, you draw on the full spectrum of creativity within your team and help it come to life in your client’s work.
- Nurture and grow talent – If you want to develop and grow your team’s talents and expertise you need to let them try their luck in different areas. Delegation lets you do that every day. While it doesn’t mean every person will be a success at every task, it does give them the opportunity to find their calling.
How ActiveCollab Helps You Manage & Delegate Tasks Like a Pro
When you take the right approach to delegation, combine it with insights, and take it to a task management platform, you can achieve maximum efficiency and elevate output.
A task management tool like ActiveCollab can help you streamline task assignment and management. Giving you a complete overview of delegated tasks, you can pinpoint the team members who are on track to delivery and the ones who are struggling. Having this kind of information at your disposal daily can prevent delays for all your client campaigns and projects.
By using time tracking reports and workload dashboards, you can make better decisions on which members of your team have the capacity to take on delegated tasks. And when you see a task is not tracking to schedule, you can divide it across several team members to alleviate employee stress, and guarantee the task is finished on time.
Creative agencies need tools that increase productivity and simplify client processes. They also need a centralized platform that lets them create campaigns, assign tasks, and house documents. But they also want the flexibility where their clients can jump in and interact on the creative pieces of work that need to be approved. ActiveCollab does all that and more, which is why agencies love us!
So, if you’re an agency founder looking for software that will streamline your client workflows, you’ve landed on the right blog. Sign up for ActiveCollab’s 14-day free trial, or book a demo for a guided tour, and see how you can take your campaigns from idea to invoice all-in-one tool!
