Jack Daly, author of the best sales book, “Hyper Sales Growth”, correctly stated that “If you don’t have an administrative assistant, you are one”.
In our annual survey of commercial real estate professionals, respondents overwhelmingly stated that they are mostly in reactive mode during their days and often ask themselves where their time goes.
One of the critical factors in utilizing your time as effectively as possible is to ensure you are only working on your most productive activities. For someone responsible for originating deals, this would include tasks such as prospecting, listing, negotiating and closing. There are certainly productive, non-transaction related activities, such as planning, budgeting and self-development.
In regards to those non-productive activities, top producers leverage the fine art of delegation.
5 CRITICAL STEPS TO DELEGATION
1) Share your vision of the end result with your team, administrative staff, and/or vendors.
Simply telling someone what to do is easy and will most likely result in miscommunication and ultimately wasted time. Don’t just tell your team what to do, but why. Empower them to understand the ultimate goal of the task.
2) Set clear expectations on when you need it to be completed.
Be specific on timelines and confirm understanding of when a project needs to be delivered. Don’t just suggest “by Tuesday”, but stated, “I need the draft by Tuesday at noon.”
3) Be realistic in your expectations.
Before you share what you want and when you want it, you need to perform a reality check. First, in commercial real estate, nothing is life and death (some may suggest it’s more important than that, but it isn’t). Secondly, as a leader, you need to provide adequate notification and resources to your team for them to meet your realistic expectations.
4) Have the necessary systems in place to monitor progress such as a shared CRM system.
Today there are a plethora of platform options to delegate tasks and monitor progress within the framework of a team or even through vendors.
5) Remind yourself that “I can do it better and faster myself” will not make you wealthier!
If it’s not a productive activity, you really should not be performing the task. Whether it’s market research or picking up dry cleaning, there are always alternatives that are much less costly than your personal productive time.
The fact is you cannot get time back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. However, you can decide how you wish to allocate and utilize the time you have.
