Like everyone else, you just have 24 hours in a day. To get more done, you can try to work smarter. Or you can grow your team and delegate work.

If you’re really busy, it is easy to delegate work and just hope it will get done the right way. This might feel effective for a while, but it is bad for both you and for the person you delegated to, because you won’t know the quality of the work and you can’t help the other person to get better. In most cases, the end result won’t be as you would have it done. This creates frustration and destroys trust. Which will make you think that it is easier to do stuff yourself.

This is where “trust, but verify” comes in. It is a powerful concept, because it requires you to have trust in the other person but at the same time it requires your attention to detail and involvement to check and see if things get done properly.

There is a tendency to be afraid of being micro-managing people. You shouldn’t be. Trust is never a part of a micromanager. This again comes back to making sure people know why they are doing certain things, you trusting them to do it in any way they want and at the same time verifying if the end result is the way you need it to be.

Before someone starts with a task or project, make sure he or she knows how you’ll be checking in with the project. Communication is everything, so I expect that people communicate if things are running late. I’ll be asking a couple of times if things are on track and it is always good define milestones where the work up to that point can be reviewed. This step should take up the majority of your time involved.

During the task or project, stick to the appointments you made. Make sure to follow through with them by scheduling the things in your calendar or task manager. Don’t try to change the way things are getting done, just ask questions and keep an eye out.

After the task or project is completed, evaluate the work. Evaluate the amount of input from your end as well. If you’ve been following through on the earlier steps, you already provided feedback on the product. This should be the easy part and hopefully you're looking back on a succesfully delegated project or task.

Simple stuff. So easy to mess up. Good luck!

This is a follow-up from part 1 on trust but verify.