A big part of keeping control of your energy, time and workflow is the concept of effective and efficient delegation. Delegation is an art form, and one that is frequently bungled. Ineffective delegation yields two people doing the same job, re-working tasks or processes being dropped. The overall net effect is waste, inefficiency and loss of quality in the service or product.
Necessities for effective delegation
There are several common characteristics to effective delegation, no matter the size of the task and whether they are inside or outside your organization:
- Identify the task chain. To go from start to finish, some task chains are only two links, such as making a patient appointment. Some are fantastically complex, such as building a jet airplane. The more steps in the chain, the more failure points there are, and the more you can consider partial delegation.
- Identify the personal responsibility for each step. Who is responsible for what task?
- Identify which portions of the task chain are being delegated. You might retain responsibility for some of the tasks, and delegate others. For example, you might delegate the encoding of an expansion of your website, but retain the responsibility of content creation or image acquisition.
- Identify the desired end result. What are the measurement criteria for the last step? How will the delegate know when the task is completed properly?
- Create feedback loops when an overall task is shared. This helps you identify the slowest link or the rate-limiting link.
Delegation outside your organization
This happens in nearly every business, and is a sensible and rational way to handle necessary tasks. Should you learn every nuance of our tax code, or should you delegate the task of tax filing to a CPA? Should you construct an employee policy handbook and procedural manual yourself, or should you delegate this to a consulting service? Should you calculate the payroll and attendant taxes every pay period, or should you delegate that to a payroll firm? Should you wash, dry and fold linens used in routine patient care yourself, or should you hire a linen service to do that for you?
Anytime you can hire (delegate) to a skilled, experienced, licensed or certified professional, you are usually in better shape than if you try to become excellent in all things. Important features are the ability to monitor progress, access to the final product and assessment of cost-effectiveness.
Delegation inside your organization
For doctors, this is a critical skill to develop. The ideal end result is that the doctor is spending 100% of his/her time doing things that only doctors can do. This means 100% delegation of all administrative tasks, marketing tasks, business management tasks, accounting and financial tasks, etc. In the real world, this is next to impossible, or is cost-prohibitive.
So where to start? The easiest and highest leverage place to start is in the administrative arena. Do we have written job descriptions for admin staff? If so, do we honor those items? Many times, the doctor will simply pick up admin tasks that the employee has dropped, and the job ends up being morphed to fit the employee, rather than the other way around.
Observe your own behaviors and time budgets during a routine workday. Are you spending time with tasks that someone else can do so you have more time and energy freed for the things that you are best at? Are you doing admin tasks out of habit or because an employee just does not like to do them?
Delegation of non-core tasks does not mean, “you’re too good for this.” It means that you are working to position yourself in your area of greatest strength and value to your company and to your clients. {{alert-hmwk}}