E125: The missing piece of the delegation puzzle
Mar 16, 2022
Everyone tells you to delegate, but what happens when people make mistakes, do the wrong thing, or come back with 17 questions? You waste time. You get frustrated. You may even regret delegating the job in the first place.
Whatever you do, don’t take that job back and do it yourself. You know that if you don’t delegate, you’ll never be able to grow your practice or find time for all the other things you truly value.
Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.
So what’s the secret to delegation success?
Standard Operating Procedures.
Yup, SOPs are boring but they’re a foundational piece of the delegation puzzle. Without them, tasks will take longer than they should, people will make mistakes, and you’ll be stuck answering far too many questions.
This week’s tip is to take a critical look at your practice and ask yourself if you’ve got written procedures in place for the tasks you want to delegate.
It doesn’t matter if you call them SOPs, Processes, Guides, or Checklists. All that matters is that they are:
- Written down
- Clear and complete
- Accessible to everyone who needs them
A good SOP will provide your team with everything they need to complete a task correctly on their own, without coming back to you with questions.
Eventually, you’ll want a library of SOPs in place for every job that you or others in your team do more than once, but you can start with the ones you’d most like to delegate.
Your action item this week is to create one SOP or checklist for a job you’d like to delegate.
When you build a library of SOPs, guides, and checklists, you’ll be able to delegate effectively and deliver more value for yourself, your firm, and, most importantly, for your clients. Put simply, you’ll be much more likely to be recognized as a true value-driven legal professional.
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