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Now that you have implemented new strategies over the past 8 weeks of this blog series, you hopefully are finding greater success with your personal productivity. Today, I will speak to a monster key to supreme productivity: delegating and empowering others.

Tip #9, Delegate and Empower Others!

You are only one person, and you are lucky (and good) if you can contribute 35 quality hours in the course of a week. So it makes sense that the best path to supreme productivity is to get others to do important and profitable work for you. Here are some things to consider in implementing this core strategy:

1. Assess your needs then allocate (or reallocate) your work. Determine what the key components of your work need to be, and then ask yourself, “How well are we getting these done?” Are the skills and abilities of your current work crew sufficient to meet these components? Are the skills and abilities of your work team aligned with their job assignments? Are your people only doing what they can do well? If not, change it up. Put people to work on the key components, and assign the work keeping each person’s areas of strength in mind, and you will reach a level of synergy that will serve the organization well. Focus on strengths when assigning tasks. (“Who can do it best?”) Don’t make the common managerial mistake of assigning work to someone simply because of position or title.

2. Next, hire to fill your needs. When you hire, hire for the skills you need the most to achieve success. In a prior life, and as President of a company, I found myself spending nearly twenty hours a week doing the company accounting. When I went out to replace my bookkeeper, I spent a little more and hired a competent accountant. I spent the additional twenty hours a week doing what I should have been doing: landing new customers and creating strategies for growth. This “investment” paid off in a big way. Similarly, I found a lack of strength in the clerical side was costing me at least an hour a day, looking for files and paper work. By replacing an office position with a legal secretary, someone who was highly organized and productive, I had an extra 7+ hours a week to do the things I needed to do to make my business better. Moreover, she literally caught tens of thousands of dollars in potential errors each year, more than offsetting the additional cost of her salary.

3. Don’t be afraid to hire people better than you. I laugh that I even have to put this here, but this is a big mistake many owners and managers make, probably due to their own egos. Why limit yourself to your own skill level? Take the best people you can get, reward them, and keep them happy. I ran a successful sand and gravel and contracting company, even though I struggle to change a light bulb. I also made a lot of money doing it. I did it by hiring the experts, and keeping them.

4. Let your employees own their work and specialize. Once you have your team in place, hand over the properly assigned work and let each team member own his or her assigned work and run with it. Do not micromanage, or your business will be stagnant and limited by your own constraints and limited, generalized knowledge. People are motivated when they are given authority and responsibility. While you may want something done differently (“your way”) in the short-term, the more you refrain from stepping in, the better off your organization will be in the long-term. Let each person become the specialist in his/her assigned area, and let each develop the methods to achieve your organizational goals. If it’s their product, they will work harder and achieve better results than you can imagine.

The best moment as an owner or manager is when you realize that your company is incredibly successful, and you don’t feel like you’re contributing much because the work is being done by the people you oversee and supervise. It’s now that you have achieved real work-life balance, and you can leave for a vacation or long weekend without fear. You will deserve a bigger bonus and more pay, because your organization will continue to grow and prosper. Now, you can spend your time planning and preparing for the future.

So tip #9 is to delegate and empower your employees to achieve work within their skill sets. Let them own the work, and they will surprise you with their efforts and their results. Your success will be measured by the value of work produced by those that you oversee.

Next week, “Prefer Action to Inaction.”