One of the biggest responsibilities you have as a business leader is keeping tabs on where your people are spending their time. And more importantly, recognizing where they should be spending their time — and delegating responsibilities accordingly. 

Because when responsibilities are delegated to the right people, you’re able to:

• Build a more engaged and productive team. When your team’s in charge of the tasks that they’re good at, that they enjoy doing, and that are aligned with their career path, they’ll come into work with a little more pep in their step. And they’ll be 13% more productive than they would be if they were unhappy with their responsibilities at work.
• Optimize resource allocation. When none of your employees have too much (or too little) on their plate, you can be sure that time is spent wisely throughout your organization.
• Streamline operations. When who does what is crystal clear, you can rest assured that important responsibilities are actually getting done. Bonus: When you give your team the how-tos they need to execute those responsibilities (ahem, in Trainual), you can be sure they’re actually getting done right).
• And so much more.

But delegation is no easy feat. You’ve got a big and busy team on your hands — one that’s collectively executing a wide range of responsibilities every day to keep your business running like a well-oiled machine.

That’s why you need to map out who’s accountable for what — alongside factors like skill, passion, career alignment, business impact, and time commitment. Only then can you clearly see what needs to be prioritized, who's got too much on their plate, and who's best suited for each responsibility. So you can delegate accordingly.

Let’s go over your three main options to plan out responsibility delegation in your business: hire a consultant, plan manually, or use the new Trainual Delegation Planner (AKA, the new kid on the block).

Option 1: Hire a consultant

When you partner with a consultant, they can help you figure out how to delegate responsibilities to your team effectively.

First, the consultant will assess the current state of your team, including the skills, capabilities, and workloads of each team member, likely by interviewing or surveying your team. Then, they’ll work with leadership to understand the goals and objectives of your organization and the projects you’re working on to ensure that delegation aligns with your broader business strategies.

Using the information they collect, they’ll identify any gaps between the current state of accountability distribution and desired outcomes. And figure out where to delegate business responsibilities to meet your business’ needs.

Your consultant might also help you develop or refine your process documentation, provide implementation support, and evaluate the effectiveness of the delegation strategy — making adjustments as necessary.

The only con of this method: Depending on the size and complexity of your team, the consultant’s experience, and other factors, it can get pricey. So be sure you do your due diligence and find a consultant with expertise in your field.

👉 Want help scaling your systems? Hire a Trainual Certified Consultant today.

Option 2: Plan manually with classic tools

When you opt to manually map out responsibility delegation, you can grab a classic tool like a whiteboard, spreadsheet, or doc and get crackin’. 

You’ll likely want to include the following as you plan:

• Responsibilities. 
• Responsibility descriptions. 
• Time commitments.
• Team members and groups. 
• Links to helpful training material.

To help things stay organized, you can create columns for each of the above to map out where things are currently delegated. And based on what you see, you can re-assign responsibilities to other people and groups as needed.

Whether you use a physical whiteboard, or something online like a sheet or doc, it’s important to house your delegation plan where it’s visible to all team members. So everyone’s on the same page with who’s accountable for what.

You might have firsthand experience that using a classic tool like a whiteboard, spreadsheet, or doc can be overwhelming and tedious. And it takes a lot of manual labor to comb through documented information and analyze the factors needed to make delegatory decisions. 

So next, we’ll talk about a new, easy-to-use tool that’s built just for delegating the responsibilities in your business.

Option 3: (New!) Leverage the Trainual Delegation Planner

You can now delegate responsibilities right in Trainual — where all business responsibilities (and instructions on how to do them) already exist. Helping you stay ultra-efficient as you figure out who does what (and if it should stay that way).

Here’s how easy it is to use:

Step 1: Gauge employee responsibilities alongside their strengths and your company goals.

It’s possible you’ve recently looked at an employee’s work and caught yourself wondering: Is there someone better suited for this?

There are loads of factors that come into play when you’re trying to figure out who should be taking on a responsibility. The main questions you want to ask yourself are:

• Who’s good at this responsibility?
  It probably goes without saying, but you don’t want the people who are bad at something to be doing it. But you don’t necessarily need the best person to be doing it either. Maybe your CEO is the best at de-escalating angry customers. It doesn’t mean they should be doing it — after all, they’re busy building your business! (This is why we’re considering multiple factors here — not just skill. Let’s keep reading.)

• Who’s passionate about this responsibility?
  We do our best work when we’re passionate about what we’re doing. You know this, but you might not be paying close enough attention to it in your business. Your employees don’t have to love every single thing they do in a day, but you don’t want them to loathe them all either.

• Is this responsibility in line with someone’s career path?
  Career development is one of the most important things to your employees. In fact, employees who feel like they are progressing in their careers are 20% more likely to stay with their company over time. Ideally, you’ll give responsibilities to the people who want to grow into them. So be sure to consider career alignment when making delegatory decisions.

• What’s the business impact of this responsibility?
  Finally, you want to look at the responsibility as a whole and how it impacts your business. Is it driving revenue? Enhancing customer satisfaction? Boosting your brand or operations? If not, maybe you need to take it off the table entirely.

What’s cool is you can answer each of these questions (and more) in the Delegation Planner on a five-point scale. 

Let’s say you’re evaluating your “Write and distribute the monthly newsletter” responsibility. And right now, Sam is in charge. Sam is super good at this, but if she’s being 100% honest with you, she absolutely hates doing it. And it’s not really aligned with her career path. You can open up this responsibility in your Delegation Planner and rate her:

• Skill: 5.
• Passion: 1.
• Career alignment: 2.
• Business impact: 3.

That way, you can clearly see Sam’s evaluations (all beautifully color-coordinated, of course) and take them into consideration when deciding if it should be delegated to someone else. 

🔥 Tip: Want to rate your team on additional factors? Say less. You can customize up to 10 responsibility rating terms in the Delegation Planner.

Step 2: Evaluate responsibility time commitments and how they add up for your people.

It’s equally important to understand how much time these responsibilities actually take. After all, you need to know not just what, but how much is on everyone’s plate to understand who’s overwhelmed and who’s got some extra bandwidth.

If you haven’t stopped to analyze employee workloads recently, you might have some burnt-out people on your hands. Or even worse, some thumb-twiddlers with not enough to do.

Instead of leaving workloads to chance, estimate the time commitment of each responsibility right in the Delegation Planner. All time commitments will automatically add up so you can clearly see how much time employees and groups are spending on their responsibilities.

Step 3: Delegate responsibilities to who’s best suited for them.

Okay. So you’ve figured out who should be in charge of what — based on employee skills, passions, and career goals; business impact; and how much time goes into each responsibility. And (shocker) you found out people are not spending their time doing the things that they should be doing. Now what?

If you were in a spreadsheet, you’d let out an exasperated sigh in preparation for a disorganized copy-and-paste marathon. But you’re in Trainual. So all you have to do is drag and drop.

Maybe you want to delegate a responsibility from your customer support team to your customer success team. Simply drag that responsibility over from your customer support team column and drop it in the customer success column. And just like that — you’ve optimized your business operations. High five.

Step 4: Connect training content to each responsibility — so your team knows the right way to get it done.

Now that you’ve delegated responsibilities to all the right people, you’ll need to train everyone who’s in charge of new things. And this can be done right in the Delegation Planner!

When you click on a responsibility, you can paste a link to the training for it. Helping everyone stay on the same page with how to get it done the right way.

And don’t forget, you can create multiple boards (think: virtual bulletin boards) for different needs that arise. Here are the main times you’ll want to leverage the Delegation Planner:

• Short-term changes.
  Let’s say your employee Sara is going on parental leave next month. She’ll be gone for several weeks, and her teammates will need to pick up the slack while she’s out. Simply create a board called “Sara’s Parental Leave” and distribute her responsibilities among the team so they know who’s in charge of what in her absence.
  

• Long-term changes.
  Maybe an employee is resigning or retiring (cue the tears). You’ll want to map out which responsibilities go to the new hire and which should be delegated among your existing employees.
  

• Routine business planning.
  If you’ve never sat down to map out how responsibilities are delegated across your company, it’s time. You can start by evaluating the responsibilities of each department in your company. You can simply create a board for each department and drag and drop responsibilities to delegate them across the department as needed.

At the end of the day, your business is constantly evolving. And as it grows and changes, you need to figure out which responsibilities are under control — and which need to be delegated elsewhere. So you can hold your team accountable for the responsibilities that keep your business running seamlessly.

👉 Ready to start delegating like a pro? Try the Trainual Delegation Planner for free.