Law firm owners often tell me that they struggle to delegate and delegate well.
As a result, their team members are not performing well.
Perhaps you’re a law firm owner who has a team member who isn’t doing the work you’re giving them as well as you want them to.
Or, perhaps you’re a law firm owner who has just hired somebody and you know you need to up your game around delegating better because you feel like you could do it better than you currently are.
So here is what I have learned along the way.
I used to get so pissed off with team members if they didn’t achieve a certain thing or get a certain thing to me on time.
It was frustrating as hell.
But what I’ve come to realize is that a lot of those performance issues were due to a lack of delegation skills on my part.
It’s way too simple to blame a problem on a team member, but often that problem starts right at the beginning of the task if they don’t fully understand what they’re supposed to be doing.
So I want to share with you today the five steps that I’ve learned on how to delegate more effectively.
Delegating is seriously under-rated in enabling and empowering your team to perform better and faster, so you can get on with the shit you want to be doing.
#1: Use a password manager
This is where you use a software to share all the passwords you use for your different softwares and programs.
There are lots of different password managers; LastPass is what I use, and also 1Password is quite highly rated.
These allow you to give team members access to all the different accounts they need to be able to use in their jobs.
The reality is, in the digital world that we live in, whatever work you’re getting them to do will require them to login to some sort of software or online portal.
Often you won’t want to give them your actual password, especially if it’s your password for other things.
But if you use a tool like LastPass, it means you can quickly share passwords with team members so that they can get access without seeing the actual password itself.
You can also share a whole group of passwords at the same time.
For example, if you’re bringing on a marketing person and you want to share access to all your different social media profiles, marketing software and other websites you use, you can pretty much do that in one go.
It’ll take like 30 seconds to do that in LastPass.
They’ll never know what your passwords actually are, they won’t have to try to remember different logins, and they’ll have them on hand whenever they need to use them.
#2: Screen share
Often the instructions we give to a person we’re delegating work to just aren’t very good.
This is especially true if we just rattle them off and they try to make notes.
Or, you’ll try to write it down yourself, and it won’t be clear what you’re talking about.
Either way, it ends up in them coming back to you to clarify the instructions, which is a waste of time and holds up progress.
A great way to show people how you want things done is to video your own screen as you do that thing yourself.
You can even record it with you talking at the same time, explaining what you’re doing and why.
You can do this using a screen recording software like Loom, and then give the recording to whoever needs it.
The extra fabulous thing about screen share recording is that it’ll exist for as long as you need it to.
You can get the person you’re delegating to start creating a process manual or guide for their role, and they can put these videos into it.
That means the next person who comes into that role already has a lineup of videos that’s a how-to for all these different tasks they have to do.
#3: Project management software
You may already use a project management software, but if you don’t, this is a great opportunity to start using one.
What it allows you to do is, both you and the person that you’re delegating to can log on and see all the different projects and tasks you have on, and the status of where these tasks are at.
It’s a really effective way to track tasks all the way through from when they start to when they’re completed.
It helps your team to multi-task, you can keep track of things, and there’s so much more visibility of everything that’s going on at once.
This is also really important if the person you’ve delegated the work to is suddenly off work, like if they’re sick or have a family emergency and they’re away for a few days.
It means you can jump into that software and see the status of where everything is at so someone else can pick it up.
At Automio, we use Trello and we also use Asana.
I’ve also heard people recommend Monday and BaseCamp.
Go and check them out, pick one that works for you and then figure out how to use it.
Once you have one, you can get a login for all the people you’re delegating work to.
I really recommend investing some time in the software and getting it working well too. When you do, it will save you a lot of time and headaches because you will be able to instantly see where everything’s at.
#4: Start small
Instead of delegating huge jobs to someone straight away, start with some smaller or more defined jobs to get them to cut their teeth.
That way you can both figure out your delegation style.
You can see how they react to what you give them, and they can start off with some small wins to build their confidence, and also build your confidence in them.
This is especially true with someone who has only recently started working with you.
When you do this early on, you can quickly build up to bigger jobs.
#5: Define “done”
Often when we’re delegating a task to somebody, they understand what they need to do but they don’t really have an accurate picture of what the world looks like when this job is done.
Spend a bit of time not only explaining what needs to be done, but explaining what it looks like when it’s done.
What you would expect to see, what insights they’ll have, or how they’ll know whether it’s completed to a satisfactory standard or not.
When you give them that understanding, they can actually make it happen, instead of continuing to do that task without really knowing why, or what they’re trying to achieve.
If you’re interested in scaling a law firm, or building, designing and selling online legal solutions and learning about how to do the marketing around that, then there’s plenty more for you to discover over in my Savvy Lawyers Facebook group.
