Managing a team? Business owners like you will surely relate to this…
At the start of your journey, it’s just you and your business. You’re a solopreneur and you’re doing everything yourself.
Then you finally got the courage to hire your very first staff (most probably a VA or virtual assistant) who takes some routine and mundane tasks off your plate – hurray!
Your business is now growing and you eventually hire two to three more staff like a copywriter perhaps? A designer, customer service, tech support?
As your business scales, you become too busy again. Now you might ask yourself why does this thing keep happening to you despite the fact that you’re paying people to help you? Well, that is because managing a team takes a LOT of work – even if you have a great team working for you.
Let me share with you the top 3 things that tend to eat up both your time and energy when it comes to team management…
Answering Questions
What really goes into managing a team? Not everyone can do what you do. Not everyone has all the answers. So, even if you’re already laid out a project well, your team may still come up with some questions — questions that you may not have thought of ahead of time. And in the event that you or someone else is not present at the moment to answer those questions, this will cause a bottleneck in the processes of your company. As a result, a ball could have been dropped while your assistant waits for the right response.
Checking Work
Micromanaging is not fun at all. However, if you have certain expectations about the output of your team member, then you would need to inspect and check his/her work. The truth is, when you lead a team, you walk around ‘the office’ ensuring things are being executed properly and correctly because we can’t just assume that things happen the way we want and expect them to. The greatest teams tend to do their best work when they are working with a manager who is also active as well as engaged in the process.
Operating from Systems
Systems are needed when running any business. They can’t run on the basis of having people alone. Turnover of employees happen and the business must run even when team members go. That is why it is important to have standard operating procedures (SOP) documented. processes and systems must be documented so both new and old team members will have a proper reference as to how things are done in the company.
Remember that when you build and lead your team, it is not a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of thing. But having processes and systems to follow is a huge part of what makes a business run smoothly.
So it does make sense to not only hire assistants and team members, but make sure someone looks after them as well so you can take care of the things that really grow your business.
If you know you’re the bottleneck in your company, and you need help with delegating tasks and taking care of your people and processes, check out our services at https://yourvirtualservices.com/services/. We’d love to help you!