Most people are horrible managers, which is why it can feel so hard to find quality help, and to hire the right team. In this blog, we’re going to be breaking down how to actually delegate most effectively and in a way that allows your team to thrive so you can have a successful coaching company.
Hey there, my name is Soph, welcome back to my blog. I am the founder of The Sacred CEO agency and also of multiple six-figure coaching businesses and programs. I have helped over hundreds of women and other entrepreneurs in being able to successfully scale multi-six-figure and even multi-seven-figure companies online over the last seven years.
And over the last few years, I’ve also had the incredible opportunity of working inside of some of the biggest brands in the industry and seeing the behind the scenes of what it really takes to be able to scale a business sustainably. That being said, in today’s blog, we’re going to talk about the ins and outs of how to delegate effectively and why it is that you may be finding it so difficult to find quality help.
Table of Contents:
- Creatives Are Not Natural Managers
- Record What You’re Doing & How You’re Doing It
- Creating A Supportive Culture
Creatives Are Not Natural Managers
So if you think there’s really no good quality help out there, I’ve got news for you, boo-boo, you might just be the problem. So let’s talk about why it is that it feels so impossible to find quality help and are people who can really get things done well. To start off, coaches are not natural-born managers. They’re oftentimes natural-born creatives, which is usually counter to what a manager is and how they operate and how they think.
Therefore, when a coach goes to try to find team and hire team, there’s this instant assumption that whoever they’re hiring is going to be able to easily step into the role, have it all figured out, not need any oversight, not need any training, not need any management. And they are setting themselves up for massive disappointment and frustration. I know this from personal experience on both ends of that conversation.
Understand Where Your Strengths & Weaknesses Are
It’s really, really important that you as a coach recognize and understand where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. And if you are a natural-born creative, we also want to appreciate the fact that we need to develop the skills of management and organization to have a thriving team in our business. So how do we solve this? One is actually recording. Recording, yes. I’m going to say one more time. Recording verbatim like on video, whether it’s a Loom or Zoom or whatever you want to use, recording what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.
This is probably one of the easiest ways to start to document and train your team members without having to constantly be repeating yourself or taking things over and doing them yourself, which is the complete opposite of what we’re trying to do when we’re bringing a team on board. So I’ll go a lot more in depth on creating SOPs, but for now, just understand that you do want to record what it is you’re doing, and create content that your team can easily go and access that are called SOPs or standard operating procedures.
Record What You’re Doing & How You’re Doing It
The purpose of recording and creating SOPs is so that you actually have a clear process that your team can follow, and that is built on what your value system is on how you do things so things can be done in that way.
A Common Mistake, Over-Assume & Undertrain
The next step is to take your time and train your team. I think the biggest mistake that I see again with coaches and creatives is they over-assume what people can do and they under-train. So they bring a lot of people like when they need them so much that they don’t have the time to train them. And it feels like their team members are constantly putting out fires.
We’ve seen this time and time again with many of the clients that we’ve worked with, either in our coaching programs, inside of our agency and all across the board. You want to hire a team before you need to hire a team so you have the time to properly and equitably train your team, instead of just firehosing your team members with all the things that they’re doing wrong, and all the things that they need to do.
And before you train and hire your team, you need to know what you’re hiring for. We went deep into knowing who to hire and what to hire for in our last video, so make sure you go back and watch that if you haven’t already. But the biggest piece here is you want to make sure that your team members know what their roles are and what their responsibilities are. So when they have a clear role that’s clearly outlined and they know what their daily, weekly, and monthly tasks are, what the duties are of the role, how they know that they’re being successful in their role, how they know when they’re not being successful in their role, then it is so much easier for them to succeed.
It is your job as the business owner to create these pieces for your team members. This does not mean that you have to be a dictator in how things work, but it does mean that you can be collaborative and ask them for support, ask them what they really want to be doing inside of your company. What are the pieces that they thrive in? What are the things that they think when it’s done really well and when it’s done poorly? How do they know that it’s successful when they do said thing so that they can start to thrive in it?
Set Up Boundaries When It Comes To Delegation
But more importantly, so that you can start to have boundaries and clarity on what to delegate to who and when, as well as how long does it take to do said things? And more importantly, if you have proper SOPs in place, how do said things get done well?
Okay, so let’s be really honest here. I want to know and let me know when the comments. It’s okay, we’re not going to judge. I’ve been there, we’ve all been there on both sides of this. Have you been a nightmare boss? Have you been pushing and hiring, and then firing and coming from a place of urgency in your business with your team? It’s okay if you have, you can go ahead and let us know. And on the other end of this, have you experienced that in either corporate or in business where somebody has hired you and they were a nightmare boss? Let us know what your experience of that was in chat below and I’d love to hear from you.
Creating A Supportive Culture
That being said, let’s talk about the third and most important piece of hiring and delegating, and making sure you have an A star team, that is cultivating a culture that is safe for people to ask questions and make mistakes. This doesn’t mean that it’s a messy business and that people are always doing horrible things or that nothing gets done right. This means that you’re creating a place and a community and a culture where your team members know that it’s okay for them to ask questions, that it’s okay for them to ask for support. That it’s okay for them to say, “Hey, am I doing this correctly?” And you’re not just going to nip at them or bite at them if they’re asking said questions.
Train For 3-6 Months
You want to make sure that you’re taking the time to train them. And you’re giving them at least three to six months worth of space for them to really master the role and master your company. You also want to make sure that you are planning into your hiring and delegation and team process overall, and like at least a month worth of time where they just get to come in and shadow with you and understand the company and how it works, where they can find things, getting familiar with the software is so that they can be set up for success.
The worst thing that you can do when it comes to delegation is just bringing somebody in, having no structure, no real understanding of what their role is or what their responsibilities are, and handing them a million different things to do expecting it all to be done right away. Your team is going to hate you. You’re going to hate your team. No one’s going to be happy. It’s going to be a disaster. It is going to just be a fire dumpster, not good.
And start to really focus on cultivating a much more equitable, much more safe and much more sustainable business practice that you can actually scale and feel really good about scaling. That being said, if you are curious if hiring a team and delegation is actually the right step for you in your business right now and if that is actually the thing that’s keeping you from sustainably scaling, go ahead and click here to take the business bottleneck quiz. Inside of this, we’ll ask you a few different questions that will help you understand and assess where you currently are, what’s actually stopping your business growth and what next steps you need to take specific to your unique situation on how to sustainably scale your business online.
Key Takeaways:
#1: Understand where your strengths are and where your weaknesses are. Develop management skills to have a thriving team in the long run.
#2: Record what you’re doing and how you are doing it to help train team members in the future.
#3: Cultivate a culture that is safe for people to ask questions and make mistakes.
