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| Mar 31, 2007 2:36 am |
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re: Delegation (not!) |
Denise Michaels
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Hi Mark:
I totally agree with you. My business is home-based - but I have a part-time assistant and I have several subcontractors that I'm delegating work to at any given time.
In the past I've had my assistants - gradually over the years write up their own procedure manuals ala Michael Gerber of "E-Myth" fame. Of course I've fine tuned and tweaked it - but now any reasonably skilled admin can walk in and will automatically know how to do certain tasks that I expect to get done by simply following the step-by-step manual. We have a weekly check-in meeting where we go over all my assistant's projects she's working on for me. She works mostly from home - but she's local so she can do things like go to the post office and send out shipments of my books or receive things from the UPS store or whatever.
The subcontractors on the other hand were another matter: since they're not in the area and they're freelancers and have other clients I found the need unfortunately to go after them to find how they were progressing with my projects:
At the moment I have a web designer, a graphic designer, a copywriter (helping me put together a new media kit), a virtual assistant, an online advertising specialist and a life coach. I don't have to keep after my coach because we meet on the phone - but with the rest of the people - keeping them all corralled and on track was kind of like bowling with cats.
I was always contacting them to say, "How are things progressing with ___________?" I've been through this before and things can slip through the cracks otherwise. A friend of mine I was brainstorming this with suggested, "Denise, you're personality is so much that of someone who's a leader and in charge - I think people you work with have a tendency to sort of follow your lead - maybe without thinking about it."
I decided to turn the tables so that I wasn't always trying to keep tabs on them. I told each one - in a nice way - that one of the terms of us doing business together is that it's incumbent upon them to contact me about twice a week to let me know how they're progressing on various projects. And if there's no progress at least tell me that and why.
Now, I don't have to track these people down and wonder where things are at. And by putting the responsibility back on them I've found that for the most part they are all more accountable for their actions and for getting my projects completed in a timely way.
All the best,
Denise Michaels
Author, "Testosterone-Free Marketing"
Visit me online at http://www.mentoringwithdenise.com Private Reply to Denise Michaels (new win) |
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