C-Suite

The Business Owner’s Guide to Delegation

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As a small business owner, delegating some of your responsibilities and tasks probably doesn’t come very easily to you. Your business is like your child, it can be hard to let someone else be in charge of certain aspects. Delegating requires you to relinquish control of different areas of your business in order for you to devote more time to the business as a whole. 

Without delegation, business owners often spread themselves too thin while struggling to find balance and trying to do it all, which can be dangerous for the success of the business. Delegation is a critical skill for business owners to have, even though you may not find yourself willingly giving away control, because there’s no way someone else can do things for your business as well as you can, right?

With the right approach, mindset, and methods when it comes to delegation and division of labor, you can become a master of time management and allow all aspects of your business to flourish and prosper.

How To Accept The Fact That You Need To Delegate

Let go of the “I can do it all” Mindset

Just because you think you can do it all doesn’t mean you necessarily have to. Doing everything inevitably means you probably aren’t doing everything as well as you could be. By delegating, you are able to focus on fewer tasks, and devote more time and effort to those tasks, resulting in a higher level of productivity, quality, and less stress for you.

Typical Tasks Business Owners Delegate

We should start off by addressing the tasks most business owners usually choose to delegate. These tasks include:

Web Design and Maintenance

Unless you happen to be in the tech business or have extensive knowledge when it comes to web design, this is an area of expertise where it may be necessary to delegate tasks. Learning how to design and update a website regularly, on top of everything else you do to run a small business, can take up a lot of your time, time you could be spending elsewhere. 

Accounting and Bookkeeping 

This is one of the most common tasks business owners choose to delegate, as it requires specialized skill, attention to detail, and a good amount of time to upkeep. Outsourcing the accounting and bookkeeping of your business can be extremely helpful if you don’t feel comfortable managing the numbers of your business all on your own, or if you’re looking to avoid the headache of learning the ins and outs of business accounting.

Digital Marketing 

Similarly to web design, unless you are radically familiar with marketing online using email campaigns, social media, or similar methods, delegating the digital marketing aspect of your business can save you a great deal of time, and can definitely lead to an increase in profits in the long run. Think of delegating your digital marketing as an investment, rather than an expense! 

Customer Service

On top of everything else you have to do on a daily basis to keep business running smoothly, taking breaks in your busy work day to field customer questions and complaints can often feel like the last thing you have time for. Why don’t you let someone else handle it? Outsourcing your customer service can take a huge burden off of your shoulders and gives you one less thing to worry about during your workday.

Tech Support

Even if you’re quite tech savvy, you shouldn’t have to waste your time working to solve tech issues and troubleshoot tech problems when you likely have a million other business related things going on each day. As a business owner, you shouldn’t have to worry about fixing the wifi, refilling ink cartridges, or assisting with computer crash issues. Delegating to a tech service company or individual can save you time, as well as provide advice and guidance towards new technology that may be an asset to your business.

How to successfully delegate

Choose the right person and provide as much information up front as possible

When deciding to delegate, make sure you’re choosing the right person for the tasks you’d like to delegate. If you’re looking to delegate your digital marketing tasks, it likely wouldn’t make sense for you to hire a tech support company, unless they happened to also be skilled at digital marketing. To find quality companies, firms, and individuals to hire to take care of some of your small business needs, try to get references from other professionals or professional websites, such as the testimonials page of a potential company’s website.

After choosing the firm or individual that feels right for you and your needs, make sure you provide as much information up front as possible about the different tasks you need completed. Provide them with details, exactly what you’d like them to do on a day to day basis, what a completed project should look like, and deadline details. Giving explicit details will help the employee to be as efficient as possible, achieve a result you’re happy with, and will help your employee complete a job just as well as if you had done it yourself, which keeps you from feeling the need to micromanage.

Another smart delegation idea is to set up checkpoints to make sure that everything is on track and being completed the way you want it to. Checkpoints offer you and your employee a place to collaborate, regroup, make edits, and create the best final product possible, exceeding your goals and expectations.

There you have it. A quick business owner’s guide to delegation. Delegating can be one of the best things you can do for yourself and your business, as long as you remember to let go of your “I can do it all” mindset, delegate tasks you don’t feel comfortable doing yourself, choose the right person to delegate to, communicate often and avoid micromanaging! By delegating aspects of your business, you’re on the track to a more productive and profitable company.

 

We are here to help you navigate so schedule a call to discuss your specific business goals

Top 10 Time Management Tips for Managers

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Running a small business is no walk in the park. Between taking care of clients, managing web presence, working with your employees, general administration tasks, and chasing leads, you tend to constantly have a lot on your plate. As a manager or small business owner, your day to day life and business responsibilities can get pretty hectic. Poor time management can make stressful situations more stressful, and lead to problems, mistakes, and no work-life balance. 

While there’s not a lot you can do in terms of reducing your workload and making yourself busy, managing your time well can make things run smoothly and help your responsibilities feel like less of a burden. By making sure your time is well managed, you will be able to be the most productive version of yourself and get much more done than before, leading to less of the “I need more hours in the day” internal dialogue throughout your work week.

Here are some of the best time management tips that will help to boost your productivity.

1- Avoid Multitasking

While multitasking– jumping from task to task- can seem like a good idea when you’re pressed for time, it can actually make completing tasks more difficult, reducing your overall productivity. Shifting between a number of different things all at once requires your brain to adjust quickly to new tasks, reducing focus levels and leading to careless mistakes you’ll just have to spend time correcting later on. 

Focusing on a single task for a shorter amount of time is a smarter method of time management than working on multiple tasks for long periods of time. Remember, trying to take care of a task while also checking and replying to emails every few minutes is still multitasking and is still taking away from your productivity! Save the emails until after you’ve finished your task.

2- Make a daily to do list and stick to it

You should begin each work day with a list of goals to be accomplished for the day and commit your day to accomplishing those goals only. Without a clear set of tasks at the beginning of the day, you can meander through your day, touching on multiple tasks, but never fully completing any. Making a bulleted list of things to get done or creating an hour by hour breakdown are great ways to keep your day structured and organized.

3- Use an online organizer to keep track of multiple clients, deadlines, and projects

Online project managers, which help you to keep track of multiple projects, deadlines, and clients, can help you to stay organized when you have a lot of moving parts. Getting bogged down and confused by all of the different things you need to accomplish for different clients can seriously inhibit your productivity. Online organizers like Asana and Monday can keep you organized so that you can better organize and manage your work week.

4- Experiment with different productivity methods

Humans are always searching for ways to become more productive, ways to get more done in a short 24 hour day. A popular productivity/ time management method is The Pomodoro Technique. Developed in the late 1980’s, The Pomodoro Technique consists of setting a timer for 25 minutes, working on a task with undivided attention for those 25 minutes, stopping and taking a 5 minute break when the timer rings. Then, you restart the process all over again. After you’ve had four consecutive 25 minute interval sessions, also known as pomodoros, you then take a longer 15 to 30 minute break. This technique allows you to maintain freshness of the mind and not become burnt out from staring at one project or task for hours on end.

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5- Don’t be afraid to delegate tasks

Anyone who’s skilled in time management delegates tasks. It’s one of the best ways to simply have more time. By handing off tasks and duties to someone else, you are able to make more time for yourself, your own tasks, or urgent tasks. While it can be hard to relinquish control, as long as you learn the right way to delegate, and avoid micromanaging, delegating tasks can be the ultimate time management tool.

6- Automate what you can

We live in such a technologically advanced world these days, there is almost nothing you can’t automate. From social media posts to email newsletters to web updates and more, you can automate just about every aspect of your business. Imagine how long it takes for you to go into social media, decide what to post to keep your account active, create a post, a caption, and a photo (depending on the platform). Now imagine how much time you’d save if you used a social media automation tool to post. This is just one example of an aspect of your business that can be automated for efficiency and better time management.

7-Identify and Eliminate Time Wasters

This goes hand in hand with automation and delegation. Identify what you take time out of your daily tasks to complete, identify things that are wasting your time. Perhaps it’s your social media management. Maybe it’s running tech support in the office because the wifi went out for the third time this week. Or maybe it takes you 30 minutes to refill the ink cartridges in the printer each week. Or how it takes you over a month to figure out the accounting and taxes for your business. Whatever it is that’s wasting your time, eliminate it! Outsource these jobs to other people, delegate tasks to your employees. You can improve your time management tremendously just by removing time wasting tasks from your to do list. 

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8- Learn to live by the 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule is one of the most helpful methods of time management. The method essentially states that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. What does this mean in terms of time management? Let’s put it in terms of a to-do list. The rule suggests that two out of ten items on that to do list will turn out to be worth more than the other eight items put together. But where does the problem come in? Often, people will procrastinate on the top 20% of tasks, known as the important “vital few”, while wasting their time on the other 80%, or the “trivial many”. 

To fully harness the time management capabilities of the 80/20 rule, you will need to apply it to your everyday work life. To do this, each day, take a look at your to do list. Now ask yourself, if you could only accomplish one of the goals on that list today, which one goal would be the most important, most productive, make the most impact? Then continue to ask yourself that question after each task is crossed off of your to-do list. Get ready to see massive productivity results after starting this method.

9- Organize your workspace

A cluttered workspace can lead to a cluttered mind, which slows productivity and leads to procrastination, confusion, laziness and mistakes. Make sure all areas of your workspace are clean and organized to maximize productivity and improve your overall work experience.

10- Don’t procrastinate!

Procrastination is the polar opposite of productivity and quality time management. Procrastination is the enemy. Oftentimes, we find ourselves procrastinating because the thought of starting a task, especially a large one, or the first one on a large to do list, is too daunting for us to even want to begin. A way to combat this is to just dive right in. Don’t think, just start working. Sounds easier than it actually is, right? A fun method to get yourself to just jump right into a project is to count backwards from 5. Once you finish the countdown, you have to get up, or put down the phone, or stop doing whatever you were doing to procrastinate. This countdown method really works, so next time you find yourself procrastinating, give it a try.

Now that you’re equipped with the 10 best time management tips for business owners, you’re on your way to becoming a more productive, more organized, less stressed version of yourself! Try these tips, tricks, and techniques, get ready to watch your productivity soar like never before.

Striking Balance with Whole-Brain Leadership

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JUNE 5, 2019 RESEARCH REPORT

New Rules of Engagement for the C-suite

  • The complexity of today’s disruption is challenging executives to transform their companies, their C-suite and themselves personally.
  • The C-suite must work collaboratively with influential, purpose-driven “Pathfinder” customers and employees, a group that values a well-rounded, whole-brain skillset in leaders.
  • The opportunity for the C-suite lies in closing the gap between the skills and behaviors Pathfinders expect of leaders, and what the C-suite deems important.
  • C-suite leaders adopting a whole-brain approach see a positive bottom-line impact and realize on average 22% higher revenue growth and 34% higher profitability growth.
  • Three accelerators will help C-suite leaders achieve whole-brain thinking to drive higher-value problem solving.

Feeling the Pressure

Exponential leaps forward in consumer expectations and innovation are forcing massive changes at a lightning fast pace across industries everywhere. The combinatorial impact of these disruptive forces — along with the exploding demand for machine learning-powered analytics and the plummeting cost of data on one side, and the need for human-centered approaches to tap into the full potential of customers and employees on the other — is fueling this unstoppable wave of evolution.

Our new global research homed in on the ways in which C-suite leaders need to respond. At stake for these leaders: retaining relevance and credibility as individual leaders and as a leadership team.

Business leaders are under pressure now more than ever, especially leaders at the top. For their organizations to not only succeed — but to truly thrive — in this ever-complex age of disruption, C-suite executives must put forth a bold, new and different response.

The Avalanche of Disruption

Pressures are compounding and converging on the C-suite like never before.

85%

of C-suite executives report that the disruptive impact of new technologies is increasing in intensity.

74%

of C-suite executives report that the disruptive impact of shifting customer demands has increased in the past three years.

72%

report that the disruptive impact of new market entrants has increased.

62%

report investors are among their most disruptive stakeholders.

49%

report that employees are among their most disruptive stakeholders.

Embracing the Positive Agents of Change

Our research shows there are three groups of employees and customers that company leaders are accustomed to adeptly managing — we’ve labeled them the “Agitators,” the “Disenfranchised” and the “Indifferent.” Then we have the “Pathfinders,” a new group we identified that is remarkable for both their characteristics and influence.

“Pathfinders” are of particular relevance. This group is framed by self-perceived empowerment and motivations, and by their belief that they can effect change within companies they work for and buy from. Instead of being viewed only as an additional destabilizing force, this “supergroup” of employees and customers can be positive agents of change to be embraced. They comprise a third of the 11,000+ employees and customers we surveyed globally.

And yet, they are a considerably varied group exhibiting a wide array of notable characteristics. Neither entirely Millennials nor Gen Zs, Pathfinders defy categorization by conventional demographic means. Rather, this group is defined more by a unique mindset than simple demographics.

If C-suite executives engage Pathfinders, they will find that this unique group of allies has the power to accelerate and guide the type of change leaders must make to continue to remain competitive.

Market shifts and technological advances are compounded for C-suite leaders by new disruptors.

The Super Group with Super Powers

The C-suite is not oblivious to the power and potential of Pathfinders. Nearly three-quarters of this “supergroup” believe they have the potential to destroy business value if their expectations are ignored. That’s the bad news. The good news: Pathfinders possess significant influence. As employees, they are twice as likely to be on the fast track to leadership and have critical skills. They are also 67% more likely to buy from companies who contribute to society. By taking the lead from the Pathfinders, the C-suite can make important new allies and provide the on-ramp to the change they need to position themselves and their companies for success.

Expectations for the C-suite: Whole-Brain Leadership

Our research indicates that Pathfinders are pushing the C-suite to find new ways to lead, grow and sustain their organizations — demanding a new type of leader to engage their passion, principles and capabilities. Their expectation? Leaders who have a strong balance across analytics-led and human-centered skills.

This approach blends what’s traditionally been considered “left-brain” (scientific) skills that draw on data analysis and critical reasoning with “right-brain” (creative) skills that draw on areas like intuition and empathy. Bringing the two together intentionally to drive deeper levels of problem solving and value creation is critical.C-suite teams that proactively embrace and promote whole-brain approaches in their companies yield better financial outcomes than those that don’t.

But the majority (89%) of today’s C-suite leaders hold business school, science, or technology degrees and have honed “left brain” skills—like critical reasoning, decision-making and results-orientation. Numbers. Data. Stats. The science of management, rooted in reasoning and proof points. This has served them well, and these capabilities will always be vital. But they are no longer sufficient.

 

Whole-brain Skills: Closing the Gap

The C-suite values a whole-brain skillset, but less than Pathfinders do. This is where the C-suite can close the gap in what’s expected of them (see the gap illustrated below for the different countries in our research).

In fact C-suite leaders themselves (65%) say their “right-brain” skills are weakest and recognize the need to strengthen their right-brain skills — including empathy and intuition — for a well-rounded whole-brain approach.

 

 

USA

The beginning of a shift is underway. While only 8% of C-suite leaders report using a whole-brain approach today in their companies, 82% say they plan to leverage a whole-brain approach in the future.

8%

use a whole-brain approach today

82%

intend to use a whole-brain approach in the next 3 years

Not only is adopting a progressive whole-brain leadership approach good for building diversified thinking and decisions, it’s also good for the bottom line.

Case in point: Accenture Strategy’s research showed a correlation with stronger financials on average over a 3-year period for those companies using a whole-brain approach today. That’s 22% higher revenue growth and 34% higher profitability (EBITDA) growth.

22%

higher revenue growth

34%

higher profitability (EBITDA) growth

Building tomorrow’s whole-brain leaders

Effective leadership requires mastering and blending both left- and right-brain thinking. Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering embraces this imperative to do more than educate great engineers – they are building tomorrow’s whole-brain leaders who will help take the world in a whole new direction. They empower their students to become whole-brain engineers by integrating elements of left-brain thinking—analysis, logic, synthesis, and math—with the kind of high-level right-brain thinking that fosters intuition, metaphorical thought, and creative problem solving.

The National Academy of Engineering recognized Dean Julio M. Ottino for the development of Northwestern’s whole-brain engineering philosophy with the 2017 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technical Education.

Make the Plan, Work the Plan

The path forward is clear.

1. Address the skills gap: Nine in 10 C-suite executives are beginning to take action by using organic and inorganic ways to tackle the skill gap in their midst. Over half of the executives surveyed report active reskilling efforts aimed specifically at the C-suite and 46% are bringing in new talent from outside their organization.

2. Redefine traditional leadership: Harnessing the power of the Pathfinder group is essential. By embracing them, granting their voices access to traditional “leadership only” channels and acting on their insights, the C-suite will gain allies and re-credentialize their leadership. And because Pathfinders are two times more likely to be motivated to give their best to their employer, and twice as likely to choose a more expensive brand because they prefer what it stands for, the entire company will benefit from leveraging these natural agents of change.

3. Drive change deep and wide: Getting this right is a balancing act. The C-suite must build these balanced skills and use them at both the organizational and individual level. This will enable them to leverage a whole-brain approach to solve the higher value problems that today’s combinatorial effect of disruption presents. And by leading from the front, they will ingrain data-led and human-centered skills into the organization as the new norm, paying dividends short and long term and enhancing competitiveness.

About the Research

The Whole-Brain Leadership: The New Rules of Engagement for the C-suite report from MW Consulting, Inc. Strategy is based on insights from research including interviews with 200 C-suite executives from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States; survey responses from more than 11,000 employees and consumers in China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US; and in-person focus groups in Spain, the UK and US. The study found that leadership teams that actively acquire, deploy, demonstrate and embed diversified whole-brain thinking across the organization fare better financially than those that don’t.

 

*We are here to help you navigate so schedule a call to discuss your specific business goals