Learn How To Delegate
When you get to a more senior role within your firm there will never be enough time to do everything by yourself. It is just not possible to build up a large £1 million+ client portfolio while doing the day job and working on your career all alone.
The benefits of delegating responsibilities are many. For example, it means that your team is more likely to take full ownership for the task, which should mean a better completion rate. Having ownership means the team are more likely to take the initiative and take over this part of your workload permanently – rather than you always repeating how to do the task.
The more senior you get in a firm, the greater the need to delegate for a multitude of reasons. If you don’t delegate, you stop the following happening:
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freeing up your time for more higher value activities, e.g. business development
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generating a good profit margin for the work you are doing
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developing people more junior to you
WATCH
How to delegate effectively so that you have time to work on your career
Remember, if you hang on to the work you are given rather than always looking to delegate everything you can do down, you’ll slowly but surely kill your career. If you can’t be replaced, you also can’t be promoted…
Get Started! Here are 3 easy ways to start delegating next week:
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Attendance note
The next time you’re at a client meeting, see if you can take a junior member of the team with you. This produces a win-win. The junior gets valuable exposure to client meetings. You get someone to take notes and complete the attendance note from the meeting.
TOP TIP: When you ask the junior to write the attendance note, always give them a fairly short time frame it which to get it done. Otherwise, it may not get written up in the right time frame for you.
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Diary management
Making time to speak to the right people in your network at the right time takes time. Time that could be better spent billing or actually working on your career or your business development. If you have access to a secretary then ask them to help you make sure you routinely have time with the people, such as introducers, who matter to you.
TOP TIP: Give them names and email addresses and tell them how often you’d like them to get a call in your diary, so they can do this easily.
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Allow plenty of review and rework time
Don’t assume that what you delegate will be done to your personal standard or be right first time. Always make sure that the deadline you give allows you plenty of back pocket time before you need to report back to the client. This back pocket time allows for some slippage on the junior’s stated timetable, and for you to actually incorporate their work into your thinking before you go back to the client.
WORK THROUGH:
How to Delegate Like a Pro
This on-demand course will help you delegate your work to others to free yourself up to focus on more valuable or important things to spend your time on.
This course contains a video with a series of exercises to complete after the video. By the end of the course you will have:
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Understood how to delegate effectively
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Identified the right mindset to delegate
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Understood how to improve your ability to delegate
