Delegation through the Lens of Dark Comedy

Do you own a business or does your business own you?

When we started our business we had two-thousand dollars from the sale of a Corvette and a three-month-old daughter (Our Erin who is now 31). We lived in our business and often didn’t leave it for forty-eight hours at a time.

We did everything.

After three months we decided that working all day six days a week, caring for our daughter 24/7 and cleaning the business was just too much.

So we hired a young couple, who had day jobs but needed extra money, to clean our business five days a week and we would continue to clean on Sundays to give them their weekends. We didn’t want them working so much they burned out. Funny how we didn’t see that we were the ones in danger of burning out.

We were hard working but we weren’t the brightest stars in the sky.

It didn’t take long for our new employees to approach us and let us know that mopping eight hundred square feet with a grocery-store mop just didn't cut it.

We bought a commercial mop from the janitorial supply twenty-five miles away($75). Ka-ching!

Then the bucket wasn’t big enough for the new mop ($80). Ka-ching!

Then the mop was too big to wring by hand. So, we got the matching commercial mop wringer ($120). Ka-ching!

And in the end of this process the mop was too big to clean the corners properly and so on weekends my wife and I spent extra time cleaning every corner. My wife and I weren’t even the brightest asteroids in a galaxy far, far away.

Why did we jump through these hoops?

We didn’t know what we didn’t know.

We didn’t know how to hire. We didn’t know how to set up a system. We didn’t know how to train a new employee. We didn’t know how to delegate. We didn’t know how to run the business even though we could do all the jobs within that business.

I hear business owners say all the time that they delegate. But when you deal with their business, or work within the business, there’s no consistency in the way their employees do things and absolutely no follow through.

You’ve got to have a system of delegation.

When I’m teaching this process in person I often get the small business owner to start with one simple job. A job I call the “water-cooler cleaning hat”.

Why the WCCH? Most small businesses have water coolers but it’s rare that they have someone delegated to clean and care for the water cooler. It’s rarer yet if they have a quality control system that insures the water cooler is cleaned.
This development of this one tiny system gives the business owner perspective. This opens the door to understanding that there are a whole series of tools you need to run a business.

If you can cut hair it doesn’t mean you can run a barbershop. If you can cook it does not mean you can run a restaurant. If you’re a veterinarian it does not mean you can manage a veterinary practice. This could go on all day but I think you’ve got the idea.

The Five Steps of Delegation

Step 1 - Write up exactly the result you want. Is there a statistic for this responsibility? Find it. Document it.

Can you inspect the results of this process to insure you’re getting what you expect?

There’s a purpose behind every responsibility in your business. What is the purpose of this particular hat?

Do you have a quality control system in your business that insures that what you think is happening is what’s actually happening when you’re out of town? In fact, when you get all these things done and your business runs like a tank the best way to check on it is to go on a well-deserved vacation.

Step 2 – Write up exactly what you do to get the result you want.

Who should do this? A person who’s doing this responsibility the way you want it done. So, it may have to be you.

Does it have to be you? No, but it’s always amazing when an employee you believe knows how to do a responsibility writes it up. You read it and get this awful feeling in the pit of your stomach. Their write up shows you how much they don’t know about doing this particular responsibility.

Imagine for a moment if you had five receptionists and they were all doing their jobs differently. Answering questions over the phone by giving out different answers. How would this look to your clients? How much confusion would this create?

Step 3 – Show the person who is to perform this responsibility how to do it.

People learn by doing.

Shadowing does not work.

Step 4 – Let them do it.

This is the hard part. You tend to look over people’s shoulders and let them know when they’ve done something poorly or incorrectly. Or you sit back and do nothing until the straw that broke the camels back lands on you. Then you line everyone up and shoot the whole lot. Or perhaps you go to another employee and complain to manipulate them into approaching the new guy with some suggestions.

Unless you’re dealing with nuclear warheads, mistakes are part of the process.

People learn from their mistakes. This takes time. It takes encouragement. It takes catching them doing something right.

Step 5 – If the person is not following a normal learning curve you now have a problem. And approaching problems is a topic for my next small business article.