The big mistakes to avoid when delegating for the first time

It can feel a little daunting when planning to delegate parts of your business to someone else for the first time. But there's some things you can do (and mistakes to avoid) to navigate this process more easily. In today's episode, I'm sharing 3 big mistakes that you can avoid when delegating for the first time.

– Why having clarity about the role you need is essential before you even start looking for someone to fill it.
– How hiring an “all-rounder” is different to hiring an “expert” and how to identify who you need and why you need them.
– The importance of training your “all-rounder” to set them up for success with templates and processes.
– How hiring for skills is different to hiring for personality and what's more important for the role you need them for.
– Why giving adequate instructions for process-driven tasks and great briefs for creative tasks are so important to set them up to do their best, without expecting them to read your mind.

 

 
Today we're talking about delegating because I know this is something that if you haven't already started doing in your business, it might feel really unfamiliar and really quite scary. I first started hiring and delegating in my online business probably about four years ago now and I started out where many online business owners start, which is with a virtual assistant. 

And, fortunately, I've had a great experience with her. I still have her on my team but I've also seen other online business owners not have such great experiences with delegating the first time around, and often it's because they're making one of the mistakes that we're talking about in this episode.

 

Mistake #1: Not having clarity on the role before you start looking for that person. 

If you don't know what the role is, what their responsibilities and tasks are going to be, how on earth do you think you're going to find the right person to do that? Because you need to know exactly what you are delegating before you find the person who has the right skills and the right personality traits to perform those tasks and those duties. 

So I would always recommend getting really clear on exactly what you need them to do. And obviously, that list will grow over time after they start working for you but the initial list of things that they're going to be doing and then thinking about what skills somebody needs to have to be good at that role. But also when you're hiring and delegating for the first time, you have the option of hiring an all-rounder, somebody like a virtual assistant who is good at a broad range of things, but they're not an expert in any one particular thing most of the time or you can hire somebody who is really good at one particular thing, who is the expert at that one particular thing. 

For example, If you need a podcast edited, you could hire a virtual assistant and train them in how to edit your podcast, or you could delegate to a professional podcast editor. So it's up to your needs to decide and up to how much training you want to do etc to decide what you need to do for each of these tasks that needs to be delegated. 

So an all-rounder is going to be better for the tasks that can be trained versus somebody who is that expert is going to be better for the things that require quite a high level of expertise that perhaps you don't even have. 

 

Mistake #2: Expecting a virtual assistant to be the expert and not training them. 

Now, generally, a virtual assistant is going to be that all-rounder. They're not going to be an expert in brand strategy or in copywriting or in graphic design. If you are not training them or at least giving them really good processes and setting expectations, then you're going to set them up for failure. And unless they're very experienced in that particular task or that skill, then most of the time you're going to need to show them what to do and how to do it and that means learning how to do it yourself first and then creating a process or standard operating procedure where you're outlining step by step how you like it done. 

I think one of the key things when you're delegating is, it can really help to know what you are doing first so that you know what to expect, you know how long it's going to take and you know how you can help that person out when they get stuck.

Obviously, that doesn't apply if you are hiring an expert, like a podcast editor, you don't need to learn how to edit your podcast first, but if you are or if you have been editing your podcast for the last year and now you're bringing in a virtual assistant, you will need to create some kind of process around how the podcast gets edited so that you can train them and then they can take what you have been doing and creating processes, I know it's one of those tasks we want to resist because it goes against everything in our entrepreneurial brains. 

Generally, entrepreneurs don't like step-by-step, but you sometimes just have to do it, unfortunately. 

So, there are two key ways to hire and that's hiring for skill fit and that's hiring for personality fit.

So when you're hiring for skill fit, it's like asking for somebody who is good at design or they know how to use Photoshop or they know how to use Kajabi, the particular skills that they have versus personality fit where we want somebody who is willing to learn and is a fast learner. Somebody who is adaptable, resilient and has grit. What kind of personality traits do they have? And this really comes down to what skills they really need versus what can be taught and if they really don't need to know how to use Kajabi or Canva to still be a good fit in this role and they can learn it pretty easily, then I would be leaning towards hiring for that personality fit, right?

One of my main team members, when I brought her on board, she'd never used ClickUp, Kajabi, or any of the tools and they were a very key part of her role, but because she was a very fast learner and was willing to put in the time to learn, that still made her really successful in the role.

 

Mistake #3: Setting them up to fail by giving inadequate instructions.

This is so common, especially if you are new to delegating. I've made this mistake so many times where I just kind of expected my team to read my mind to think the way that I thought and then if they didn't do things the way that I would have done them, it was like, Oh, this isn't as good as I could have done it, but in actual fact, it wasn't that, it was just they have a different thought process, they have a different way of doing things, and it just is different to what I would have done. 

So if you're not giving those adequate instructions, it can actually lead you to hold onto tasks because you begin to think that others can't do it as well as you can. And in reality, it's just because you're not giving them the right instructions that will set them up to do it as well as you do, right?

You can't expect somebody to read your mind, especially when they are new on your team, and they don't know you and they don't know how you work. So instead, ask yourself, whenever you're delegating a new task, ask yourself, how can I set this person who is doing this task up to win? How can I set them up to win this task? Because we want them to win. We've hired this person, we want them to succeed. So what can we give them so that they will succeed at this task? 

 

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