Are you making excuses in business?

At the beginning of each year, you probably feel enthusiastic for the year ahead. You [hopefully] set some goals for your business, communicate these with your team, and get ready to start actioning those tasks to reach your goals.

However, the momentum can begin to dwindle and before you know it you’re back to making the same excuses of “I haven’t got time” or “I haven’t looked at my plan in weeks”.

Here are 5 ways to keep on track and to avoid making excuses in business:

1 Manage and allocate your time

You haven’t gained or lost any time since the year began. You have the same hours in a day now that you had when you were full of enthusiasm for the year ahead, but something has changed. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day to day running of your business, and those tasks to achieve our business goals take a back seat and you begin to feel there’s just not enough hours in the day.

The solution? Manage and allocate your time! It sounds simple yet few of us do this well. Block out 2 hours a week in your calendar every week. Allocate one of those hours to reviewing your goals; where are you with your action points? what needs to be prioritised to achieve those goals? The second hour should be your team meeting, communicate with them and make sure you are delegating and managing efficiently.

2  Communicate with your team

There are many benefits to communicating with your team. A team that feels valued and involved in the company will perform better. They have targets and goals to meet, which you set them, and if you’re lack of communication is the reason they haven’t completed their task you may find your staff frustrated and feeling undervalued.

As suggested in point 1, allocate an hour a week to a team meeting. This will have two main benefits – 1, they will feel involved and valued, which gives them motivation and drive. 2, it keeps you all on track and working towards the same target. Sharing all the information in your head is a step towards success.

3 Set achievable tasks and milestones

We would all love to see a 50% increase in sales and double the profit at the end of the year, and this isn’t to say that is impossible, but you need to be realistic when setting your goals and planning your tasks. In point 1 we touched on time not being an excuse, but it is a factor and if you set task deadlines unrealistically then you could be setting yourself up to fail or be adding unnecessary stress. It’s good to encourage and push, but don’t break!

Work out you and your team’s time, current workload and strengths, now set tasks and milestones that are realistic and achievable within those factors. Each completed task is a win and another step closer to your achieving business goals.

4 Celebrate small milestones along the way

Our business goals can require a fair amount of work before we achieve them. Not being able to see the end in sight can cause our energy for a project to subside. By setting milestones along the way we create mini targets that we can celebrate once we’ve achieved them, a celebration as simple as buying your team a round of pizzas for lunch in the office. This little boost will set you up to work towards the next mini target, and that step closer to your final business goal.

Be careful not to make the rewards turn into self-sabotage though, don’t spend the monthly budget on celebrations when there’s still a way to go, for example, if you successfully lose the weight you’ve been trying to shed you don’t eat a whole bag of donuts to reward yourself!

5 Ask for help when needed

Progress isn’t always straight forward and you are bound to face hurdles along the way. These hurdles can come in many forms; time, money, customers, staffing, you! There’s nothing wrong in asking for help, whether it be to talk ideas over with a team member, delegate some of the workload, get external unbiased help from a business coach, and outsource work where needed.

You may also have to deal with the harsh reality that the hurdle is you! Many business owners can cause a bottleneck within a business as they feel everything has to pass by them. It’s great to keep track of things but don’t be afraid to share the load, communicate and keep your business running as a well-oiled machine.

Effective Delegating

As a business owner, one of the key skills you’ll need to grow your business is the ability to delegate. As your business flourishes, sales improve, and your team grows, you simply will not be able to do it all. So, you must learn and practice the art of effective delegation.

To delegate means to “entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.”

There are a number of barriers (often excuses) that we use in order to prevent the need to delegate tasks or projects to another member of the team.

How many times have you thought, or said aloud?

  • “It is quicker if I do it… by the time I explain what to do, I could have completed it”
  • “It is my business; I should be doing it”
  • “There is no one on the team who can do it as well as me”
  • “What if they do a better job than what I can do”

These thoughts are related to your own limiting self-beliefs and not the team’s ability and this can result in a high level of micromanagement which is time consuming and incongruent with growth.

If you are able to delegate effectively, not only will you have a productive, strong team but your own credibility as a leader will also improve.

The main reasons you should delegate are to:

  • Free up time so you can focus on growing the business – Stop being a busy fool when you have a team willing to step in and step up.
  • Improve staff development – through delegating to your team they will learn new skills, gain more knowledge and their self-esteem, loyalty and value will increase, especially if you are following up with them.
  • Improve efficiency – not only of your team but also of the business.
  • Encourage teamwork – your team will establish new contacts and build their network. You will find team members communicating more with others both internally and externally.

Ask yourself, what’s the cost of NOT delegating!

So how do we start to delegate?

There are 4 main things to consider when delegating.

  1. Decide what you are going to delegate and to whom. It is vital to make sure that you provide a clear picture of what it is you want to be achieved. Communication is very important at this stage to make sure you have a clearly articulated task.
  2. Ensure that you have clearly defined processes and policies so that the staff can deliver. If they know and understand the processes and policies, they can also use them to make their decisions. Check that your staff have the right training and skills and if not, put a training plan in place. Provide a time frame so members of staff know when they are to have completed by.
  3. How are you going to follow up? Set milestones in your own diary to check in and follow up whether the task has been completed, and if it has been completed in the time frame.
  4. How are you going to follow through? Following through on a task is critical. If you delegate, set time scales and then don’t follow up with your team, you run the risk of not being taken seriously and if the task isn’t achieved, then your team may feel this is ok and bad habits may start to form.

If all has been achieved effectively and within the time frame, make sure you praise your member of staff and feed forward as opposed to feedback.

Ask yourself… “What’s the worst that can happen?” and if you are ok with the worst – it is probably ok to delegate!

If you would like some support to start delegating effectively with your team, book a free discovery call with me and make the commitment to achieving your business goals.

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