If your goal is to make your practice more efficient, a good place to start is by looking at how you delegate tasks and projects to your team, says Joanne Ferguson, the Toronto-based president of Advisor Pathways.
There’s an opportunity to move your business forward by helping your team members use their greatest talents, she says.
Here are the three steps to effective delegation:
1. Break old habits
The tendency to hold onto tasks can be ingrained in some advisors who want to control a certain outcome, says Ferguson.
If this sounds familiar to you, you have to ask yourself why you hired a team to begin with, she says, if you’re not leveraging their skills.
Another habit that needs to be changed could be always passing along projects to the same team member. Maybe you are comfortable with this person and are always confident that the task will be completed to your satisfaction.
However, you must be prepared for unforeseen events. For example, what if your trusted assistant or associate becomes ill and is unable to work for a week or even longer? That becomes a time period where projects can remain in limbo because no one else on the team has the background or experience to deal with these issues.
2. Discover the right job for the right person
“If you don’t identify what [a team member’s] talent is,” says Ferguson, “and you stick them in a role that doesn’t work for them, you think they’re not productive.”
However, the real problem may be that they are confined to tasks that don’t inspire them.
Assess your team members and their talents. One way to do this is through established diagnostic tools such as those provided by Kolbe Corp., based in Phoenix. For a fee, these tools can help you and your team discover everyone’s individual strengths and how those can be used to improve the group’s performance.
You can also sit down with your team and have a candid discussion on this subject. What is working? What should be improved and how do your team members feel they can contribute?
For example, maybe you think your assistant has been enthusiastic about his job lately. He might tell you that while he understands he is to provide administrative support, he is also interested in trying to improve your social media marketing.
By allowing your assistant to take on a new responsibility, he can help you improve an aspect of your business. At the same time, he will probably find more satisfaction in his day-to-day tasks.
3. Use team meetings to show accountability
If you want to increase efficiency by delegating, another way to accomplish this goal is by having team members report on their progress during regularly scheduled meetings. This reassures you that tasks are on track and everyone stays updated on the progress of the whole team.
This is key if someone is out of the office. What if a client asks a question about your next event and your marketing person is unavailable? You want your associate or yourself to be aware that the event will take place at the new steakhouse that has community members buzzing. This will inspire confidence in your client, who knows that the team as a whole is well informed and that he or she does not have to wait for a response.