The Importance of Delegation in a Growing a Boutique Consultancy

Among my mid-sized clients (30-150 employees) delegation is on of the top 3 challenges that constrict growth (after sales and codification).

The Crucial Role of Delegation in Consultancy Growth

Delegation is crucial for several reasons:

• To allow leadership to focus on….leading, not firefighting
• To lower consultant attrition by improving their skills and challenging them
• To enable succession management which allows shorter earn-outs (and fewer heart-attacks!)
• To increase the capability and thus day-rates of juniors
• To avoid ‘key person’ risks
• To develop a ‘solutions not problems’ mindset in juniors

According to a Gallup study, CEOs who are good at delegating generate 33% more revenue than those who aren’t. However, the late professor John Hunt reported that only 30% of managers believe they can delegate well. The more shocking part is that only a third of them are considered good delegators by their team.

Of course, it’s not as easy as saying ‘delegate more’ because leaders often feel that juniors do not have the skills, mindset or time to do more work, let alone make decisions that some might feel uncertain about.

It is also not just about tasks. If you focus only on delegating tasks, you will still find that all your time is eaten up making decisions that should really be taken further down the organisation.

Delegating decision-making, as we will discuss, needs to be done on a risk basis: the lower the risk to the firm, the further the decision can be delegated.

However, before moving on, let’s look at what buyers and investors think about delegation in professional service firms.

A Buyer’s Perspective

Odd as it may sound, buyers of, and investors in, consulting firms worry when they see an outstanding individual doing amazing work. This is because if that person leaves or has an accident, it leaves a hole which can be hard to fill.

Much preferable is to have a system by which exceptional work (or even just ‘good!’) is achieved by everyone through the formality of roles, training, mentoring, intellectual property and leadership. This ensures that the value of the firm is less in the individuals and more in the firm itself.

Moreover, a leadership team which is constantly pulled into the trenches to sell, deliver, fire-fight and re-do other people’s work, is probably a team that isn’t doing enough leadership.

Strategy, innovation, decision-making and motivating are the real responsibilities of the leadership team and ones for which buyers will look for evidence.

The Delegation Mindset

One of the first challenges consultancies face is bringing in structure: moving from a family-feel where everyone knows everyone and does everything, to a formal structure, where roles, reporting and processes become important ways of keeping order as the firm grows.

However, too often the structure quickly becomes a bureaucracy – too slow, too inefficient, too much ‘not-my-job’. There are lots of reasons for this but one is that the senior levels think of themselves as heroes (let me assure you that no-one else does!): jumping on the client call to save the contract, staying up all night to re-do the proposal, hitting 120% utilisation whilst doing 70 hour weeks.

As Gaeber pointed out years ago, this is not just bad for your health, it’s also bad business. A firm over 30 people doesn’t need heroes.

Thus, for many seniors, even given the opportunity to delegate, they don’t because their very identity is tied up with doing not delegating.

If you wish to adopt a delegation mindset as a leader, here’s what you need to relearn: 

1. Let Go of the Control Mindset

A lot of consultants see knowledge and control as power. To a great extent, this is still the case of Partners in big firms as it often leads to bigger bonuses. This mentality can propel seniors to hoard expertise and knowledge.

Additionally, you may have noticed that experienced consultants are pretty good at doing great work, fast. They will often think ‘I’ll just do it myself’. But not only does this prevent others from learning, it’s also pretty demotivating if you’re the junior being over-ruled.

To break out from this control mindset, go back to the basics — think about why you hired your team members. If you want to do your staff’s job, why do you pay them? 

2. Shift to ‘achieving’ Mindset From ‘doing’ Mindset

You have spent years developing your expertise and delivering exceptional results. It can, sometimes, translate into thinking that only you are the best person to do the job. For the moment, this might be true, but unless it changes your company dies when you leave.

As a leader your job is to inspire and mentor others to do achieve work that you do not need to do. If you delegate, you’ll get more time to unlock your potential as a leader and build relationships with clients and identify new growth opportunities.

3. Make Peace With Average (Initially!)

One of the reasons why seniors resist delegation is because they feel it would compromise their service quality. It’s true — you must recognize that the delegated work won’t tick-mark all the quality checks in the beginning. However, it shouldn’t be an excuse to look over the shoulders of juniors and jump in when things go wrong.

Instead, understand that your juniors will need monitoring, coaching, and training to meet (and potentially exceed) the standards that you achieve yourself. It doesn’t mean you should over-explain the task or go too much into detail about how the work should be done.

Just explain the basics and believe in how capable your people are. Remember that one of the few ways you can sustainably increase profit in your firm is to upskill your people.

4. Remove Productivity Blockers

Do you know that workers spend an average of 41% of the time on activities that offer little personal satisfaction and could be handled completely by others?

If you’re wondering why, the reason is simple — clinging to familiar work makes us feel busy and important, and ridding ourselves of that work is easier said than done. “I’m such a workaholic” is still, crazily seen as admirable in some quarters.

However, redundant tasks are your productivity blockers. They prevent you from indulging in high-value tasks that can drive business growth. If you delegate your daily work tasks to people more appropriate for handling them, they’ll result in an efficient workflow.

What to Delegate

Create a list of tasks that you do: keep a diary for a week and see what fits into the categories below. Each of these tasks should be completed by the most junior person (think of automation as the most junior!).

How do we decide what to delegate? I’m a fan of the six T’s: 

1. Tiny

Tasks like setting appointments, adding meetings to calendars, or booking tickets are small. It feels like they take seconds to be done, and thus, you end up taking them.

However, when they add up, they eat a lot of time. Do not put a second thought before delegating them: automate or get an assistant!

2. Tedious

Are you spending an hour daily on data entry, analysis or reporting? If yes, repetitive and relatively simple tasks are not the best use of your time. They don’t require any decision-making skills, high-level expertise, or management acumen. So, it’s best to let someone else from the team handle them.

3. Time-Consuming

Important and complex tasks take up a lot of time. While it may look like you need to sit on them from the beginning, you can also step in at the final stages of the task completion.

For example, conducting market research for a new client is a time-consuming and complex process. From identifying the target market to conducting a competitive analysis to gathering data on consumer behavior, it involves several crucial steps.

In such situations, you don’t need to be present from the beginning; delegate the tasks to the right individuals and keep giving direction on the next steps. In the end, all you have to do is review and approve it. 

4. Teachable

If you have tasks that can be easily taught to others, don’t waste your time doing them yourself. Even if they seem complicated at first, translate them into a sub-task system, add quality checks and standards, and take them for final approval. 

5. Terrible At

If you’re running a boutique consultancy, it’s not vital you’ll be good at every task. While many tasks will fall into your strength pool, you may also fall short of other skills. 

So, when you feel unequipped to complete a task, delegate it to team members who are far more experienced and skilled than you. It’s the only way to get exceptional results. 

6. Time-Sensitive

You must come across several sets of work that are time-sensitive but clash with other priorities. The easiest and most practical solution here is to delegate such tasks to employees who have the bandwidth to complete them quickly and efficiently. It will help you to meet deadlines and satisfy clients’ needs and demands. 

Pro Tip: Don’t delegate everything at once! Assess the priority and urgency of the tasks and step into delegation gradually. You can also begin by first assigning tasks to your team members that are less important and then move on to critical tasks.

How to Delegate?

Your firm needs to move towards a detailed understanding of the all the tasks that need to be done for it to be profitable, efficient and effective: both internally and on client projects (of course, this is easier with more commodified services).

Ideally, these tasks should be linked to roles as part of a competence map and employees should be scored against the groups of tasks they need to excel at. This should form the basis of promotion.

Delegation should also start at the top of the organisation, and cascade down. Leaders should delegate to seniors, seniors to managers, managers to consultants.

In consulting firms, this can be aided by target utilisation figures (which reduce as you get more senior). If your senior team are 70% utlilised, something is wrong, and they (not you) need to fix this by upskilling and delegating.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that delegation doesn’t require investment. Sometimes the push to delegate means that more juniors are needed. This is a good thing.

You make more margin from juniors. Indeed, the delegation project will help you many other errors in the company: defining roles; improving recruitment; understanding training needs; knowing your leverage ratios.

It’s also crucial to assess the motivation of your staff so that you can tailor the delegated tasks to their personal development needs. It will keep them engaged and motivated. Host one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, or regular check-ins to conclude. 

Here are my tips on how to delegate. These are not all things YOU have to do, but things that each person who is delegating should be aware of:

1. Frame Delegation as Promotion, Development, and Challenge

There are different ways to delegate a task. However, the way you communicate it to your junior staff makes a difference.

One of the many expectations you have from your staff while delegating is that they feel motivated to perform the task to the best of their abilities. To implement this, it’s crucial to make your junior team members feel like the delegated task is an opportunity for them to grow, and eventually get promoted.

This is especially true of those skills that are crucial to moving up the organisation: business development and people management. If consultants see this as a medium to learn, grow, and contribute to the organization, they are likely to be more invested. 

2. Set Clear Objectives to Reduce Misunderstandings

Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive, said an interesting bit about delegation, “When you delegate work to the members of the team, your job is to clearly frame success and describe the objectives.”

If you want a successful delegation process, discuss the objectives and explain the purpose of delegation, expectations, and benefits to your juniors. It’s best to provide detailed instructions and outline expectations to ensure there are no misunderstandings later.

3. Establish Tracking Guidelines and Communication/ Support Channels

Break tasks down into smaller activities, and delegate them in order of priority. To ensure the success of the task, you need to be available at the set times so your juniors can seek assistance.

Moreover, make systematic plans to set deadlines, get progress updates, and have regular check-ins with the juniors. 

4. Clarify Working Preferences to Avoid ‘Upward Delegation’ and Micromanagement

Once you have delegated a task, try to minimize the possibilities of upward delegation and micromanagement. Whether it’s a junior seeking constant approval from the manager or the manager getting over-involved in the deliverables, such situations limit delegation.

To avoid this, establish working preferences from the beginning. Clearly state the expectations upfront and your level of preferred involvement so that the junior can feel more confident.

5. Monitor & Feedback

Critical evaluation and assessment of the delegated task are vital to maintaining work quality. As a senior, you should establish clear metrics and regularly track work progress against these metrics.

It will help you to offer feedback, suggestions, and support to your juniors. You should especially be aware of utilisation targets.

However, feedback needs to be tactful. Good managers know how to provide both positive and constructive feedback throughout the process in the right taste. If you spot a mistake, refrain from blaming or criticizing junior employees.

Instead, provide them constructive feedback so that they can learn from their mistakes. Try to avoid jumping in to correct errors rather than asking them to do it themselves.

Finally…..

Delegation is one of the hardest skills to put into practice, but one that is crucial to grow your firm.

Indeed, while writing this I received an email from a leader to told me:

“It’s pretty hard to manage yourself out of the business and let others fully run operations…because when you are small you cannot hire a sales guy, an operation manager and a managing assistant”.

This is true. Very small consultancies don’t usually have the luxury of the leader working 100% on the business. However, it is a habit to start practicing early.

My advice for leaders 1-10 people firms is to start looking at virtual assistants and automation. This will get you used to packaging up tasks and realising that payback does not happen without investment (of time). But that payback does happen.