This piece originally appeared on AllBusiness.com.
Feeling overwhelmed? Managers and business owners tend to have their hands in just about every aspect of their businesses. Smart leaders know, however, that they can’t take on everything, no matter how much they’d like to handle it all on their own. That’s where delegation comes in.
If you want to take some tasks off your plate, these are the three things that strong leaders delegate most often:
1. Marketing
Do you hire students? Do any of them have ambitions of working in the marketing industry one day? Give them the opportunity to gain valuable experience while at the same time, taking tasks off your plate.
Social media, design, and other marketing tasks are vital to your company’s growth but they can also be time consuming. By letting others take on this work, you’re keeping the task in-house, crossing it off your to-do list, and still ensuring it’s getting done.
If you don’t have a team of employees who is able to take this on, you can also delegate your marketing to an outside agency. There are many agencies that specialize in one-off projects that can help you eliminate a task from your workload while still ensuring it’s done with top quality.
For more on leadership, watch this Fortune video:
2. Scheduling
Balancing schedule requests, shift changes, and other scheduling headaches can be a hassle. They’re also something that’s easy to delegate back to your employees.
Strong leaders delegate this task to their employees for a few reasons:
- It lets their team have more flexibility, creating an overall happier workplace.
- It gives the responsibility back to employees making them feel more invested in the success of the company.
Rotate different employees to set up the schedule each month. This will give more employees the responsibility of making sure your business continues to run smoothly.
You can also leave schedule changes and time off requests up to your team. Using a scheduling app or system makes it easier for employees to make any necessary changes to their shifts. For example, if an employee needs time off for a vacation, they’re no longer coming to you to get their schedule changed. By delegating this task, it becomes their responsibility to find a replacement–not yours.
3. Customer Support
You already hire team members to serve your customers face-to-face. Why not hire them to manage customer concerns by phone and email too?
Customer support can quickly become a time drain. If you’re responding to customer questions and inquiries all day, you’re not taking care of tasks necessary to build your business. Give your employees the job of replying to customers, and you’ll have more time to work on other important areas of your business.
More from AllBusiness:
• 15 Success Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs
• Most Entrepreneurs Start the Wrong Way–Here’s the Fix
• 5 Steps to Starting a Successful Business for Under $1,000
Before You Delegate…
Delegating is a time saver, but before you hand over all of your marketing, scheduling, and customer support, make sure you have systems in place to manage how well these tasks are handled–it’s important that you have the ability to review everything that’s happening in your business. Still, without having to bear the burden of managing all of these tasks on your own, you’re left with more time to help your company grow.
Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase, and other business software solutions.
