Scott D. Bade says learning
to let go can be a big challenge of delegating, but it’s
something you have to do if you
want your company to succeed.
“You need to avoid the
micromanaging,” says Bade,
whose document management
and workflow processing company employs about 50 people
and has a three-year sales
growth of 111 percent. “It
doesn’t do much good to delegate and then to henpeck or
be looking over people’s shoulders continuously. It’s not productive, and you really defeat
the whole purpose of delegating. If you’re going to do it
yourself, you might as well
just have done it.”
Smart Business spoke with
ImageSoft’s president and
CEO about how to effectively
delegate.
Q. How do you know which
tasks to delegate?
You need to obviously establish roles for your key people,
and then you need to be disciplined enough to give people
tasks that fit in to their role.
Obviously, as an executive
leader, you need to keep certain roles for yourself. Those
are mainly oversight and
strategic type roles.
Q. How do you monitor what
you delegate?
It depends on the type of
task you are talking about. We
use electronic tools to track
to-dos and things like that. If I
give someone something, I’ll
put it in a particular file to
make sure that I circle back
on it, if it is important enough.
The day-to-day stuff, you can’t necessarily track every
little thing that you give people. So you make strategic
decisions on what are the
most important things you
need to follow up on.
If you try to follow up more
at a high level based on measurable goals, instead of following up just to say, ‘Yes or no.
Did you do this?’ — the results
are what should show. So, if
you are setting the right kind
of goals for staff, then that will
show when you look at, for
instance, sales numbers or
customer satisfaction
ratings, different types
of things like that.
