The Slinky Principles – Five Steps to
Effectively Delegating Your Tasks
From The Chairman's Desk (Read the Terms and Polices)

It’s been our experience that the CEOs of many emerging companies become overwhelmed by having to wear too many hats in order to create momentum and achieve profitability. Who would have thought that the secrets to good delegation would be contained in a slinky demonstration?

On Christmas Day, my daughters received two slinky toys from Santa Claus. Yep… you guessed it, the same Santa that was kissing Momma underneath the mistletoe. The first task of the morning was to attempt an uninterrupted run of the slinky down the full flight of stairs. I never knew a Slinky was so hard to operate!

After several frustrating attempts, I finally completed a full run to the bottom of the stairs. The children cheered in excitement and we exchanged high fives. Now came the task of seeing if they could do it.

The first attempts by the children were less than perfect and, for a time, it seemed that I was the only one in the household that could routinely send a Slinky perfectly to the bottom of the stairs. Like a good father (a regular Clever Beaver), I demonstrated my style until my girls were able to mimic my procedure.

Besides taking the time to correctly train my girls how to send a Slinky to the bottom of the stairs flawlessly, here are five steps to you can use to delegate important tasks in your business:

1. The power of experience – Start by recognizing the expertise required to complete the task. Do you have to learn the skill, or can you hire someone to manage this function for you? Do you understand all the facets of a particular function in your company and the result someone with powerful experience can have on the bottom line? I hired a graphic design firm to develop some marketing kits for me and sales went up by several multipliers. On another occasion, our firm hired attorneys that specialized in specific areas of law and we saved thousands of dollars in potential liabilities.

If you are concerned about budget, remember that tasks can be divided into simple, part-time functions that can be hired out at an affordable rate. For example, if your current operation requires only 3 hours of bookkeeping per week, you can hire out that function for about $30 per week. The same tactic can be used for shipping procedures and any other repetitive task that consumes your time. Filling your time trying to cover all the tasks will destroy your ability to create momentum to profitability.

2. Routinizing your processes – Each recurring task in your business should have a specific individual that is accountable for its completion. If the task requires a special degree of expertise, have an expert work directly with the assigned person until the task is perfected. All too often, we relegate a task and become irritated when our staff is performing the task incorrectly, or inefficiently. Document the process of completing the task. The task itself, and the process of completing it, should become a routine—a system that is documented and duplicatable.

3. Repetition to perfect the system – Perfection comes by refining an existing sequence of events. The sequence of events creates a pattern. If you do something differently every time then improving your efforts is next to impossible. Business systems breakdown and momentum is lost, when a task in your company is constantly being reinvented and is never allowed to solidify into a procedure.

4. Train the delegated tasks properly – Delegation means to properly train an assigned person to complete a routine task in your organization. Relegation means that you arbitrarily assign someone to complete tasks without establishing an expectation, giving an example of the expectation, and randomly punishing the person because of unmet expectations. Proper training means having an experienced person develop or implement a repeatable system for the task and repeating the task with the new person until the procedure is performed perfectly.

5. Measure performance – Gain is lost that is not measured. There can be no expectation of progress if you are unwilling to create tracking mechanisms. Goals should be established in writing and performance should be gauged on the milestones that lead to achieving the goal. Meet with the people that are assigned the tasks regularly to establish goals and report statistics. Management becomes a much easier task when you are tracking the progress of properly delegated tasks.

As a real-life experiment, buy yourself a Slinky (No… they haven’t paid me for a product placement!) and develop a procedure for getting it to go perfectly down a full flight of stairs. Next, attempt to train someone on your procedure and see if they can duplicate your results. Keep track of each successful and unsuccessful run on a sheet of paper. Look at your results and learn your new training process! Happy Delegating!

Chris Allen is the Chairman and CEO of StreetMaker, a business and marketing strategy firm specializing in assisting small business owners in dramatically enhancing their success in business and radically increasing their revenues. Mr. Allen is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and creator of several break-through business development models and strategy tools used by small businesses all over the world to increase revenue and profits. If you would like to receive your own subscription to Street Talk, a marketing strategy newsletter click here and sign up for yourself. Contact Chris Allen today at chris@streetmaker.com

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