Why can’t I delegate client work?
Transitioning from THE point person for all clients to having team members run client accounts is not easy. It’s your business. You’ve built it. You’ve earned client trust. But, your success in delivery to satisfied clients brought in more business than you can manage alone. And, that’s why you’ve brought in a team. Once you’ve hired a team, that means it’s time to start to delegate client work.
This seems reasonable, right? Then, why is it so difficult to put into practice!
Delegate responsibility AND authority
As a business owner, assigning ownership of clients or even delegating tasks amongst your team can land outside your comfort zone. Why? It’s not you completing the work. You know how to, but it takes time to train and build trust for others, especially with clients. Passing the responsibility to do the work and the authority to make decisions are critical to grow as an ambitious practice owner.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the levels of your systems.”
– James Clear, Atomic Habits
The way forward with client work.
Based on conversations with leading practice owners using Connect4, we’ve found there are 3 foundational steps to take:
- People: Identify and hire professionals that represent the client experience you’d deliver
- Processes: Build processes and systems internally that build off your best practices
- Technology: Embrace technology for easy delegation and transparency of your team’s work
All to create a team environment and culture to empower and support your team, and practice, for success.
Why delegate?
Time is a valuable resource. Delegating allows you to be where you need to be and concentrate on what you need to for your business, clients and team.
As a business owner, delegation can increase trust and commitment with your team. It improves team productivity. And, allows for the right people to perform tasks best suited to them and their role.
“Ditch it, Do it, Delegate it.”
– Graeme Tennick, Tennick Accountants
How to delegate client work
People
Firstly it’s important to choose the right person in your team. You must have a good understanding of your teams’ strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. Delegating will require a lot of team collaboration, particularly for client management. Consider hiring for and assigning to someone who prefers and is skilled at communicating and collaborating as a team.
After selecting a team member or team to assign work, explain why you chose them. From their individual strengths to suitability to the role, this allows you to set the context to help each other in forming a strong team. Ultimately this will help them take responsibility for each task , and build an ability to take on more task ownership as well as honing new skills within the practice.
Sometimes this may be a collaborative opportunity to build trust. Sit down with your team, going through the list of items to delegate, and let your team assign or take ownership of the items/clients they are most interested in. Letting people choose the items/clients is another way to build trust with and inspire engagement among your team.
– Peter Jarman of PJCO
“There’s only one way to cope with the increase of clients – we’re seeing an increase of 20% per annum – the only way to meet this is to have systems that means everyone knows exactly what they’re doing.”
Processes
In addition, find the right processes and systems. Show your team the goals you want achieved with your clients. Give them the tools to tackle these in their own style, but whilst still using pre-set best practices. Each of your team will approach things slightly differently, but best practice must be followed. This is especially important for client work delivery and client experience.
Building processes and systems internally will build off your best practices. These will allow your team to do what they were hired for. Make key decisions, ask the right questions, and deliver to your standard.
Technology
Work smarter, not harder. Embrace technology for easy delegation and transparency of your team’s work.
Identify best in class software tools to build systems that coach your best practices. Focus on empowering your team’s ability to deliver your client experience expectations. These tools can be used to turn actions into intelligent accessible data for real time insights across your team and client portfolio.
When implementing a new software, find an internal champion to lead the way – you’re not going to be able to do it all. Find the team member with the early adopter mentality you’d take. Coach their leadership with training on the platform and the whys this software suits your management goals. Strategise early piloting to practice wide roll-out and continual review going forward.
The above will take some time and work to achieve – but without delegation the ability to scale your business is hamstrung! You built the business. It’s your name on the line. Therefore, your team will be a reflection of you.
Leading business owners use Connect4’s workflows to coach their team to be a reflection of their best practices. With their inputs, our “Prepare. Meet. Act.” workflow has been build to nudge teams to follow developed best practices across growing client portfolios. Providing insights based on human behaviours in client meetings to help business owners like you know how well they perform when delegated client work.
Learn how business owners use Connect4 to delegate client work to their teams, stop losing clients and hit revenue growth goals. Why not give it a try today?
