Tips for small business owners, or How to keep up

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

So many small business owners spend more time at work than they would like, desperate to find a balance between business and personal life. In this article, we explore the main reasons why this happens and how you can deal with it.

One of the most effective ways to reduce overhead is to delegate responsibilities to your direct reports. Often, despite the growth in the number of company employees, managers cannot delegate their responsibilities to someone else.

As an example, here's a quote from Richard Kirby's article “Why are you doing anything?” Based on an interview with Jim Alampi, a spokesman for coaching company Vistage:

Unfortunately, productivity growth directly depends on the manager's ability to delegate responsibilities, but small business owners simply do not have enough time and patience for this. Delegating responsibilities means not only empowering subordinates with new powers, but also increasing your level of trust in them.

This statement quite accurately reflects the essence of the problem. Very often, entrepreneurs take on too many roles out of necessity, which forces them to make many decisions that are important for the fate of the company on their own.

As the company grows, there are more and more such solutions. This leads to the fact that some issues, referred to as uncritical, remain unresolved. Thus, the need to solve them from time to time falls on the shoulders of the leader.

To change this dynamic and win working time, the leader should think over and communicate to the employees a new interaction scheme that involves the division of responsibility for making managerial decisions.

Here are a few key issues to consider when delegating authority to subordinates:

• To which of your subordinates can you entrust the solution of critical issues?
• Are there any reasons why you cannot trust them with more authority? Or are you not doing it out of habit?
• The subordinates' loyalty to the interests of the company is undeniable, but they lack the experience to make the right decisions. What and when can you do to ensure that they have this experience?

If you can't find answers to questions, and processing is growing, then the reason lies in yourself. Your people will remain inactive until you give them authority and awareness of reality: making mistakes is okay!

So what's your path? Let everything go by itself and not invest in the development of your employees? Or try to share power and get back to normal?

We hope you choose the second option. And what ways do you know to be in time for everything?