Being able to delegate effectively is a key success factor of having a great career. I will try to provide some insight today on how to do that. A key part of being able to delegate is understanding what part of your tasks can be delegated. At the beginning stages of your career you will not be able to do this because you are still learning. As an accountant it took me over a year before I started being comfortable enough to delegate to new hires and interns. As you learn more and more in your career you will begin to realize what tasks are lower level tasks that can be delegated. As you progress you will also learn what items matter the most. When you establish what items matter the most to you in your career, you will focus your time on those items and try to focus less on lower level tasks.

Being able to delegate is an honor. It allows you to get away from the more mundane tasks in your life so that you can focus on more important things. Just think about a CEO. If the CEO of McDonald’s cooked burgers everyday or drove a truck that delivered burgers, he would never be able to drive shareholder value. He has to focus on more important things than the day to day business of McDonald’s. He has to focus on key financial metrics and other areas that are more important to shareholders.

Now I will go into the specifics of how to delegate effectively. You will want to delegate the work that is draining most of your time away from important tasks. You also want to make sure that this work is fairly easy to delegate. You have to weigh both of these items against each other. There might be something that you really hate working on but involves a lot of intricate detail which makes it time consuming and hard to delegate. An easy example of something that should be delegated is preparing invoices. At many companies preparing invoices is a mundane task that has to be completed very frequently. If you haven’t delegated this before and it is a task you are responsible for, then I think it is something you should try to delegate. Even if it will take some time delegating it at first, take the time. The first time you delegate it you should write down everything you describe to your staff and put it in a document. Then going forward when you delegate this work to someone else or a new hire, you will have a document ready to provide them that describes how to prepare the invoice. That way you don’t have to waste time every time you delegate your tasks. Use this same method with all the tasks that you routinely delegate. If one of your staff comes to you with a question after you’ve prepared this delegation checklist, feel free to add on the delegation instructions or prepare an FAQ section at the end of your instructions. That way the document becomes more robust and you incur less time delegating in the future.

I’ve also included a few examples of items that I’ve run into that can easily be delegated.

  1. Preparing invoices
  2. Filling out timesheets
  3. Preparing draft responses to emails
  4. photocopying
  5. Entering data
  6. Preparing initial engagement letters
  7. Scheduling meetings