Nibletz Staff
Being a boss is never easy, let’s make that clear. Responsibility weighs on your shoulders and the company needs your drive and leadership to succeed. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be easier, however. In fact, a manager or company owner always have to be looking at ways to simplify the business and, in particular, their job. Otherwise, mounting pressures and responsibilities will get to the point that they’re simply too much to handle. Here, we’re going to look at how you can manage with being the boss without giving up any of that responsibility.
Take time seriously
This is a technique that you should pass down to every individual in the business, but learning time management techniques is especially important for the boss. You have a hundred and one things to do every day and without properly scheduling out your time, deciding when you do what, you might get very little done. Start every day with a to-do list, but work on a to-not-do list. You need to prioritize the tasks that are both urgent and important, first. This means putting aside those tasks that might need done but not right now. Don’t forget to keep a digital schedule of all your meetings that give you warnings in advance. Even if you’re constantly working hard to make better use of your time internally, you don’t want clients and business partners seeing that.
Know what you should do and what you shouldn’t
A big part of freeing up some more of your time is deciding when you really shouldn’t be doing a certain task. There are a few different ways to pass off work that shouldn’t be entirely your concern. You can delegate, for instance, which not only takes it off your plate but gives your employees the opportunity to grow and display skills you haven’t yet seen. Just make sure you’re not delegating anything that lies in the realm of your core responsibilities. Otherwise, consider using virtual assistants to take care of some of your more time-consuming admin work.
Automate, automate, automate
Automation software is coming leaps and bounds in the past few years and is only set to keep doing so. You can automate your payroll, for instance, making sure that you have everyone’s wages set to go out with only a quick look-over for approval needed from you. You should also automate lengthy, but dull tasks like data backup. American Express makes it very clear what you shouldn’t automate, however. One of the most important is sending customer emails and dealing with digital marketing. Tools like HootSuite can help you schedule social media messaging, but if you automate it too much, it looks robotic and false, doing the brand more damage in the end than good.
Take a bird’s eye view
As the boss of the company, then there are a lot of things that are going to regularly need your attention. Project management. Customer relationship management. Logistics and inventory. Invoice. HR records on your employees. If you’re constantly going from one tool to another or even from one person to another to get a grasp on these vital details of the business, it can take a lot of time. More importantly, it’s easy to get lost in the workload and forget one of them. That’s why many bosses are turning to business management software like FieldPulse. Whatever steps you can take to ensure that you’re able to keep track of all the different moving parts of the business, you need to take them.
Set communication standards
Just as important as being able to see all the moving parts of the business is being able to react appropriately to new information and feedback coming from the team. However, dealing with multiple emails, IM conversations and phone calls a day can make it difficult to stay on top of internal communication. You can fix those problems by coming up with and enforcing certain communication standards. For instance, you can make it clear that emails shouldn’t be used to carry out ongoing conversations, but rather for sending single bursts of important information. Similarly, make it clear when a conversation is so vital that it shouldn’t be carried out on IM but rather in person or over the phone.
Move away from people-focused processes
One of the problems that the boss will have is constantly having to train new staff. Some training is necessary, but one of the reasons that it sometimes takes too long is because a certain position in the company was filled with the only person who really knew how to do it. Instead of letting one person be the storage of all the information related to doing their job, you should follow the advice laid out by Mixergy and make your business more process-focused than people-focused. By standardizing the different processes in the business, you a couple things. You work with the team to find the best methods to carry out any single process. But you also create sticky knowledge of that process so it’s much easier for anyone to look up the method and find it out, rather than having to figure it out anew every single time.
Find your generals
As the company grows, there comes a point where you realize that you can’t deal with it all on your own. When that happens, you need to define and find the management material in the business. Managers are essential to ensuring that the work of individual employees is being accounted for and acting as a communicative go-between so that you’re never left out of the loop. Beyond ensuring that they’re good at their job, you need to make sure that your managers have the qualities that make them effective leaders. Test them in projects that measure their people-savviness, their resource allocation skills, and their ability to take the collective responsibility.
Simplify your methods, make better use of tech tools, find your best people, and set standards in the business that ensure you don’t always have to take such a close look at the work being done. That’s how you make it much easier to be the boss.
