Why delegate?
Are you a genius at self-organization? A force of nature?
Even if you are the Elon Musk clone crossed over with David Allen, your time and energy are limited.
It’s no secret that large companies are more labor intensive than small ones.
A growing company requires new tasks and activities all the time. A management role in a growing company requires new tasks and activities on a regular basis.
How can a company scale up?
The secret is delegation.
“Assigning tasks” is different from “delegating”.
Delegation is giving responsibility for one of your regular responsibilities – something you do on a regular basis – on a permanent or ongoing basis to one of your employees.
– Mark Horstman, The Effective Manager
Delegation, the Pillar of the Effective Manager
In “The Effective Manager”, Mark Horstman devotes an entire chapter to delegation, one of the 4 behaviours of the effective manager
Learning to delegate is part of the transition to executive status. Too many managers today think that because they are smarter and more effective than their subordinates at getting things done, they should try to get more done by doing it themselves. This is not sustainable, and I have seen this failure scenario play out hundreds of times.
An aspiring manager does more and more things himself (probably working longer and longer hours) and gains a reputation as someone who gets things done. Finally, he gets what he considers “the big promotion” – to the executive level. And two years later, he “resigns to pursue other opportunities.” What happened? He didn’t learn to trust his people and delegate as a manager. Then, when he got that “big” promotion, their workload tripled. Plus, as an executive, he had to spend about a third of his time talking to other executives, building coalitions to get things done. Now his workload has tripled and the time he has to do it has been cut by a third. And he hasn’t established a team of trusted managers to whom he can delegate, and he doesn’t know how. And he’s drowning in the new job he was desperate to get. And he’s asked to resign instead of being fired, because firing managers is frowned upon. If you are a manager, the key to your long-term success is to master the art of delegation.
(…)
Delegation is the easiest part of the “management trinity” to implement, because you can (almost) start delegating right away.
(…)
– Mark Horstman, The Effective Manager
The Delegation Pyramid or Cascade
In a pyramid, each person at the top is influenced by the people below them. So is everyone else, right down to the base of the pyramid.
No one ever does anything that a lower level couldn’t do, even if it’s slower or worse.
The result is that everyone does what they can do best.
Very few companies are pyramids.
I’ve only worked in two that were.
They were the best work experiences of my life.
– Richard Koch
To delegate or not to delegate?
Whether you are a manager, an executive or a director, you have different types of tasks.
Some tasks are best delegated, while others should not be.
Here are 3 types of tasks to delegate, or not…
1. A New Responsibility
If you are assigned a new task, or if you decide to take on a new task yourself, it is a very bad idea to delegate it
You don’t know how to do the task yet, so you won’t be able to take responsibility for it once it is delegated.
You also won’t know how to guide your team in doing it.
⇒ Don’t delegate a task until you have sufficient control over it.
2. An Existing and Important Responsibility
A responsibility that is important to you can be overwhelming to your staff.
Make sure that the person to whom you want to delegate an important task has the time to do it.
Accept that it will take more effort than you are putting into it now.
Avoid breaking up a large responsibility into several smaller tasks; the time spent coordinating the various performers would probably be excessive.
⇒ Delegate an important task only if your collaborator has plenty of time to do it.
3. Multiple Existing and Secondary Tasks
Let’s say, for example, that 5 of your small recurring tasks are worth 1 large one, in time and energy.
Your best option is to delegate your 5 small responsibilities to 1 or more people for whom these tasks are important.
These 5 delegated tasks free up enough time for 1 new high-impact responsibility.
If your human resources are already stretched to the limit, it’s time to ask yourself if some of their duties could simply be eliminated.
The people at the bottom of the organization chart will probably have to “trash” their less important tasks to make room for the new assignments from “above”.
Remember, this decision allows you to invest in your new, high-value responsibility. With the “delegation cascade”, you trade an important new activity at the top of the organizational chart for 5 low importance tasks at the bottom.
⇒ Delegate your secondary tasks first, spread across several of your staff.
7 Ideas for Marketing Tasks to Delegate
1. Organizing and Facilitating Meetings
Organizing and facilitating meetings is often handled by managers. Delegate these recurring and predictable tasks to your employees to develop their involvement and facilitation skills.
Why delegate meeting facilitation
- You save time on preparation
- You are more attentive during the meeting
- Your team is more involved in the preparation
- Easier to maintain discipline on the meeting format
- You take a step back from the meeting format
How to delegate the organization of meetings
Clarify your objectives and rules for organizing meetings. Help your collaborator to establish and maintain an agenda. Coach your collaborator on good facilitation practices. Give feedback after meetings.
2. Delegate Marketing Reporting
Creating reports is a time-consuming and recurring responsibility, accessible to junior profiles.
Why delegate reporting
- Creating reports is not an efficient use of your time.
- Reading a report without having prepared it gives you perspective and empathy for the people for whom it is intended
- The person creating the report makes progress over weeks or months
How to delegate reporting
Create or have created a template, provide templates and offer feedback to each report. A procedure will also be helpful to clarify steps and speed up the start-up or handover of responsibility. Checklists allow for effective quality control.
3. Delegate Presentation Creation
Marketing teams often create presentations to communicate ideas and projects to their team, management and other departments in the company.
Creating the slides or supporting documents is time consuming and does not require advanced expertise. The presentation itself can be delegated to your team.
Why delegate presentations
- To take a step back
- Involve employees
- Develop the team’s skills
- To save time
A manager helps instead of doing directly, delegating your presentations is a good delegation exercise.
How to delegate marketing presentations
Help your employees structure their presentation and rehearse before the big day.
4. Delegate Marketing Projects
Projects have varying levels of complexity, a beginning and an end, and a clear objective.
Why delegate marketing projects
- To involve the team
- Develop the skills of the employees
- Save time for other projects
How to delegate marketing projects
Provide feedback and evaluation criteria.
Coach your employees in their project management and hard skills.
5. Onboarding of Freelancers, Collaborators or Clients
Integrating a new collaborator, partner, freelance or customer into a tool, service or program requires a series of steps that are sometimes long but generally known and not very complex.
Why delegate integrations
- Standardize integrations, guaranteeing quality
- To socialize the team with the client, partner or new collaborator
- To improve the understanding of the collaborator: Teaching is Understanding
- Offer more time and attention to the onboarded person
- To save time
How to delegate onboarding
Standardize the steps, create or have created templates and improve the process at each occurrence.
6. Data capture and organization
Modern marketing is data driven: it uses more and more data.
Entering and organizing unstructured data in a software tool, spreadsheet or database is time consuming, but usually requires basic skills.
Why delegate data entry
- Save time
- Process more data
- Rely on specific technical skills
How to delegate data processing
Put in place quality control processes appropriate to the data quality issue.
Use a specialized data entry and processing service if necessary.
7. Backlog Grooming and Project Management Tools
Marketing requires project management, agile or traditional.
Content management, development tickets, editorial calendars, user stories, tasks, todo… Backlogs, boards and other trackers quickly overflow with ideas and tasks that drag on.
Why delegate the cleaning of tracking tools
- To save time
- Keep the rhythm
- Clarify
- Enforce standards and processes
How to delegate the cleaning of tracking tools
Templates, checklists, examples and processes will help you share your expectations and create a standard to follow. Tools like Loom allow you to make video screencasts in 3 clicks.
8. Delegate the management of your website
Several tasks in reality: content updates, CMS updates, plugins and themes, monitoring, modifications…
Why delegate the management of your website
- To have an up-to-date website
- A living and useful website
- To save time
- To keep the rhythm
How to delegate web management
Templates, checklists, examples and processes will help you share your expectations and create a standard to respect. Tools like Loom allow you to make video screen captures (screencast) in 3 clicks. Password management is crucial.