Business Skills - Entrepreneurialism & the Art of Delegation

In business, unless you can delegate, you’ll always be swimming against the tide. You can wave goodbye to any opportunity of running a billion dollar company unless you can put your trust in someone else to perform. Entrepreneurialism is as much about management and strategy as it is about execution. As your company grows, you should find yourself spending less time on execution. If you can’t, then maybe you should find someone else to steer the ship. This article explores the art of delegation, and how you can delegate more effectively to improve your business.

Entrepreneurialism at its finest doesn’t revolve around one person doing something on their own; it’s all about one or several entrepreneurs leading a team to succeed. An entrepreneur has to learn to delegate in order to be able to run a team successfully.

Understanding the Skills of Your Team

A good manager will always be skilled at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the people that they work with. To be able to delegate effectively, you have to be able to identify the best man or women for a given task. You also have to show that you trust them to deliver.

Encourage entrepreneurialism within your team by rewarding them for their performance. You should try to make a reward as closely tied to the person’s performance as possible. If someone works in the UK office and is responsible for handling complaints, then giving them a bonus that is linked to international P&L is not very aligned with their job. You could consider giving them a bonus linked to the following:

• Churn in the UK business. If the person deals with complaints effectively then they will limit the amount of business that is lost in the UK business, and therefore they will be highly motivated to keep customers on board.
• Customer satisfaction. It would be possible to find out customers’ levels of satisfaction, and link that to the bonus that the executive would get.
• The number of complaints the department manage to handle per member of staff. This would target the executive based on their ability to improve the efficiency of the business in dealing with complaints.

However, if the executive becomes too focused on one target, they may lose sight of other things that are important. If the person is trying too hard to limit churn, they might start offering the customer healthy price discounts that might compress margins in the long run. That’s why part of entrepreneurialism is not just about setting targets, and asking people to work to them. They have to be managed and be accountable for much more than that.

When delegating there has to be a clear chain-of-command, and people have to know that their successes and failures are noted and acted upon. People also like to know how you evaluate whether or not they’ve done a good job or a bad one. The key to delegation is setting other people targets, supporting them, and challenging them to meet or surpass the targets you set.

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