Want Your Startup to Grow? Delegate

By Kath C. Eustaquio-Derla

When you start a new business in Singapore, it becomes almost like your newborn child. You want to be involved in every single aspect of its existence. As your business grows, it’s almost similar to overseeing the growth and development of your toddler. You want to be further involved in every single facet of your child’s development and that is absolutely normal. You are not alone.

However, when other people start to interact with your ‘baby’, sometimes, a parental kind of defense mechanism kicks in. You always think you know best because you are the ‘parent’. You feel uneasy whenever you assign certain tasks to other people, who might see you as a control freak. Like most parents, micromanagers hover, leaving employees feeling restricted, even offended.

Signs That You Are A Micromanager

• You want to oversee all aspects of your business operation, day in, day out.
• You find it absolutely difficult to delegate even the simplest tasks.
•  You don’t trust your top management personnel with challenging projects.
•  You dictate, day in, day out.
•  You can’t get past the least important details and fail to see the bigger picture.
• When you delegate, you hover, even after giving detailed instructions.
• When you delegate, you pull out the project from an employee at the first sign of trouble.
• Your company has a high employee turnover rate.

Micromanagers Put Their Business in Trouble

In the book What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management, author Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business wrote, “Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off.”

Micromanagers often have the best intentions at heart – to get things done efficiently and fast, probably based on their own style of clocking in more work per hour. Sometimes, empathy will make you double guess if you should hate them since they only want to get things done, especially if they own the business. However, the numbers still show that micromanagers do more harm than good.

In 2014, Forbes.com contributor Kristi Hedges listed eight common causes of demotivation among employees. While the causes are not listed in any particular order, micromanagement is listed as number one simply because they drive people crazy.

Similarly, in a 2008 article written by Harvard Business Review contributor Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay, one of the dangers of micromanagement is employee disengagement. And she is right, disengagement is costly. If you want your business to grow, the first thing you need to learn is how to delegate.


Tasks Small Business Owners Should Delegate

Mastering the art of delegation is almost as crucial as finding the best talents. By giving your employees ownership of smaller projects and by outsourcing non-core business processes, you will be able to focus on income yielding activities and rev up your startup operations.


Here are some tasks owners of small and medium-sized businesses should definitely delegate.

Accounting / Bookkeeping / Tax Filing. As a business owner, you should know the ins and outs of your finances and keep an eye on your books. But you can definitely delegate accounting and bookkeeping tasks to the experts. Our accounting services help new businesses in Singapore keep their finances and taxes in order.

Keeping Track of Administrative Tasks. Checking your emails and returning phone calls seem so easy to delegate but that’s the very reason why you should let someone else do it. Hours spent on these tasks can add up easily and most likely, not every call will be about an urgent matter.

Data Entry. Keeping track of your customers? That’s an easy task but just like administrative tasks, hours spent can add up. The best practice is to put off data entry until you have a large pile of data that needs sorting out. This is clearly a task that you can outsource.

Customer Service. When a customer receives a return call from the company CEO or owner, it often leaves a good impression knowing their concerns do reach top management. However, a business leader cannot be on the phone managing complaints all the time. Hire someone to handle customer service so you can plot a way to improve your services or products.

Marketing. Branding is an aspect some business owners have a hard time understanding. Sure, you have a good product that works. You know it’s good. Your employees know it’s good. The same can be said for your family and friends. But other people, your bigger target market, do not understand your product the same way you do. Marketing experts know how to build a good branding campaign around your product. Hire a small marketing team and let them make noise about your product.


Delegation: Key To Business Growth

Delegation is a critical management skill, but not all CEOs have it. Gallup is a performance-management company based in the United States that leverages on research-based consulting. In 2014, Gallup studied the 143 CEOs who made it in the Inc. 500 list, particularly the difference in the performance of CEOs who have high delegation skills.

Top leaders with high delegator talent had an average three-year growth rate of 1,751 percent. The number is a stark difference in the 112 percent average three-year growth rate of CEOs with low delegator talent.

The difference doesn’t stop there. CEOs with high delegator talent also have 33 percent more revenue in 2013. These CEOs raked in $8 million more compared to the other CEOs who only raked in $8 million. With a higher growth rate and high revenue, CEOs with high delegator talent were able to create more jobs within their organization at a faster rate.

Just because you’re not a CEO of a fortune 500 company doesn’t mean you should leave delegation skills to the big boys. The art of delegation will set you apart and ensure that your business continues to grow because you have the time to plan for its future.

Published here.