How Successful Interior Designers Delegate to Their Team
Are you feeling overwhelmed with work? Many businesses are right now due to the massive desire our clients are having to control where and how they live since we are spending more time at home.
Let’s look at delegating versus dumping. As we go through this conversation, I encourage you to pay close attention because when we delegate incorrectly it can cost us. I encourage you to read (and possibly re-read) this post carefully and leverage this interior design resource to your benefit.
Delegate simply means to entrust a task or responsibility to another person. To entrust means to deliver with care and attention.
Dump means to abandon something hurriedly or to deposit something in a careless or hurried way.
There are definitely differences between the meanings of these two words. Take a moment and consider how you onboard a new employee or how you delegate a project or task. Did you dump it carelessly or in a hurried way – or did you take time to entrust a task to that person?
My guess is that we all have done both – delegate with care and attention and dump and run when we were busy.
I see more dumping of duties when we have reached our max in our business and are overloaded with work. We tend to expect our employees to be mind-readers and assume they know what we mean or intend even if we don’t tell them. Then, when the work is not done or not done correctly, we put the blame on them. What a hard fact to for us to face, but often it is true.
Before we move into how to delegate – let’s look at the fear in delegating.
Why do we experience fear at the thought of handing off certain tasks on our list? Here are a few I have encountered:
Fear of the work not being done on time
Fear of the work not being done well
Fear because you have tried to delegate before and got burned
Fear that it will take someone else too long and you will just do it yourself
Fear of asking someone to do something that you can do yourself
Do any of these thoughts sound familiar? I would tell you that all of these can be solved when you delegate well.
What does it mean to delegate well in your interior design firm? It means to be intentional about what you are handing off and set aside the time and resources to make it work.
The main cause of dumping a task is being busy, harried, or in a hurry. To delegate well, we need time to prepare, time to offload, time to review and revise.
I teach in my coaching practice the 5 E’s to delegating well:
Educate
Equip
Expectation setting
Empower
Encourage
Let’s look at each of these individually.
Educate:
To educate means to give information that someone needs to do the job. We can accomplish this by having standard operating procedures that can be written, video, or some other medium. This can also be accomplished in person. No matter how you transfer information, the goal is to transfer everything that someone needs to be able to do the task with success.
Equip:
When we equip our team members, we are now giving them the tools they need to accompany the education we have provided. This could be items like logins and passwords, computers, apps, phones, notebooks, technology. Anything that they need to do the job. This could also be a list of who to go to with questions. Who is their training partner?
Imagine knowing what to do but not having the resources to do it. Part of your SOP (standard operating procedure) should be any tools needed to do the task.
Expectation Setting:
Okay, your team member has the knowledge and training on how to do the task or job. They also have the tools to get it done correctly. Now it is time to set expectations. These expectations can come in many forms. Some areas to consider when setting expectations are the time frame in which the task needs to be completed, the form or model you want to see it done in (maybe you have a template you use), colors/fonts/branding, budget, or identifying others to loop into the completed work. Whatever you want to see and have done will need to be clear to the other person.
This is a good time to do active listening to ensure you both agree on what needs to be done and the boundaries and expectations around it. Skipping this step is where lots of frustration creeps in.
Empower:
Now your teammate knows what to do, has the tools to do it, and knows what needs to be done and all boundaries expected around the job or task are known. What do you need to do next? Empower them to do it.
Simply stated, get out of the way. Let your team member do the work. They may not get it right the very first time, did you? But if you don’t get out of the way and let them give it a shot, they will never get it done well. Empower them, within reason, to do what needs to be done. Again, this may mean letting them know how far the boundaries go, when to ask for assistance, when to raise the flag that they need serious help.
Encourage:
Lastly, let’s talk about encouragement. I mentioned earlier that when someone does a job for the first time, they may not get it all right and perfect. Life is like that. This is where grace comes in. When we actively, with intention, delegate something to someone – we need to be their cheerleader. This also means that we need to shut down our own fears and not allow the negative self-talk into our minds such as “I knew I could do this myself faster, better, cheaper, etc.”.
Create a plan to give feedback and to review and revise. Make sure that as someone else follows your SOPs that they go back and update them for anything that was missing or to add more information that they might need. Be flexible.
Those are the 5 E’s that I have found to be proven and to work in such a way that I see not only personal growth (for myself and my team members), but the growth of your interior design firm as well.
It is important to remember that if you have hired the right people, you should be able to hand off work to them and rest and trust in the fact that it is being done. Continue to remember though, you get what you inspect, not what you expect. Set clear times in the learning process (and even afterward) to have checkpoints. No one wants to hear at the end of a job that they did it all wrong. Give information as you go along that will let your heart rest and will let theirs rest as well.
You are on the same team working towards the same goals. Keep this front and center.
Delegate – don’t dump.
We all have made mistakes in this area. And I still catch myself needing to stop and take a step back to share information with someone who needs it so they can support me and my clients. I know you must do the same as your business grows and as your team shifts. The things discussed in today’s blog will not only impact your interior design profit but will also profit you in your personal life as well. I am cheering you on as you work to implement the 5 E’s into your team’s success!
We plan for this in the AIM with Intent™ methodology used in my coaching practice. If you need help putting order into place for your business, go to my website, scarletthreadconsulting.com and complete a Discovery Form. Let’s chat and see if we can work together to remove some of the stress, make your company more profitable and reclaim some of your time. My goal is to help create customized solutions for interior design firms. I'd love to help you be more profitable. Being intentional in business creates profitability. Profit doesn’t happen by accident.