Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Manage Time Better Through Effective Delegation

Business owners & managers all have busy days. moment they are cracking markets, the next they are lost in paperwork & repairing employee's gaffes. Until business leaders design & implement effective delegation policies they are going to be stuck in this senseless loop forever.

When the English Poet Edward Young born 1683 in Hampshire, England first penned the words "procrastination is the thief of time" it is thought they had in mind to charm a local lady while they still had youth left to share in each others arms. Whether this is true or not, deferring things until tomorrow is as common today as it was then, & that refers to implementing time management in business .

In the event you are frustrated by your firm's performance & are wasting time fighting fires then it is time to take a few days out to generate operations manual that helps you manage time. I am not referring to a template downloaded off the world wide web - I am speaking about a home-spun that is built to steer your ship through any kind of weather even when you are not there.

Time is the costliest input to most businesses yet some leaders still spend more time castigating an worker for being late than they do shaping & reshaping how their staff ought to spend time. Nature abhors a vacuum & this lack of effective delegation is soon displaced by what the people think they ought to do.

I use the analogy of a ship deliberately because it is a generalised example. The captain (you) must chart the coursework the helmsman steers while the engineer must keep the motors walking. As you trade along the shoreline the purser manages the exchequer as the crew completes the maintenance cycle & chips away the rust. Everybody concentrates on the job set out for them & there's interfaces not overlaps - in other words a near ideal time management structure is in place.

This tidy & neat model is not always present in business because things could be a small harder to monitor than on an imaginary ship. Everybody sticks in their oar at budget time while sales & promotion ideal the art of duplication. Nobody tells the poor fellow in production about orders in the pipeline with the net result that chaos reigns throughout the mildest storm. & that is why as manager or business owner the fires sometimes anger around you , as you do your best to back-fit order, & manage time on your employees' behalf.

A Business Coach could help you to create an operations manual that details how your business works & the contribution of each role. This ensures that jobs are exclusive as against overlapping, that everything dovetails neatly & that everybody knows their key performance area. With effective delegation like this in place & time management implemented, who knows, you may even be able to manage time so well yourself that you could get back to playing golf with clients every Friday.

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