A lot of businesses I have spoken with recently are looking to hire, onboard, and handoff things in their role to other people.
It’s an expected step in being able to manage what you need to get done, continue to grow and avoid burnout, which is why I wanted to share these two fantastic pieces of advice that came out of a peer group I ran with four members of The Leveraged Advice Firm program last week.
If you’re looking to hire, onboard or outsource any time soon, these are two pieces of advice worth knowing.
Advice #1 Be smart about what you hand over first.
One of my favourite activities to do with a business at capacity and needing to handoff is called a Role Audit.
Basically, it’s about taking a complete snapshot of what your role actually entails, and then systematically identifying everything that could be done by someone else if you had a resource, system or external party that could take it on.
It’s a real eye-opener for many advisers to realise that 40% to 70% of your role could actually be handballed by putting in place a simple training system (more on that later).
It also often exposes a common handoff mistake.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of handing off the things we don’t want to do, be it, document production (“If only I could get someone to do the advice for me!”), research and any number of activities that are technical in nature.
The problem is that technical skills tend to be specialist skills.
The solution is to look at it through the lens of time, asking, “What is easier to hand off and will have a massive time benefit to do so?”
The rule of thumb is to hand off admin tasks first, then technical tasks (followed by marketing and then, finally, delegating the delegation).
This is where David’s absolutely brilliant advice comes into focus.
“Always start people off on things they already know or have experience in”
It makes sense, right?
We all want to start strong.
It’s easy to grow confidence in your role if you’re doing something you’ve done before rather than something you have to learn fresh.
By the way, if this is hitting home, I’ll be covering this and more at a session I’m running this Friday (3 June 2022 at 12:00 pm AEST) called the Onboarding Pathway. It’s a session that’s part of The Leveraged Advice Firm program training schedule, but if you think you may like to dip your toes into the water as my guest, drop me an email.
Advice #2 Start by getting to know each other
The best working relationships always have a personal connection element to them.
Whether you were working with someone in-house or remotely, connecting is one of the most important things you can do.
People don’t work for businesses. People work for people.
This is why the second great piece of advice from the peer group session was to make the first few days all about getting to know each other personally.
The mistake usually comes because of circumstances. You’re hiring, so that probably means you needed the person on board two months ago. By the time they arrive, you’re busy. You need them to get to speed quickly, so you can clear the workload and get on top of it, so you dive straight in giving them so much information (though oddly it rarely clarifies anything) that they must think their head is going to explode.
The truth is the better approach to achieving a fast onboarding lies in:
- slowing down,
- getting to know which motivators are true for them,
- understanding their aspirations and where this role fits into that,
- defining how you both are going to work together
…is all part of the Day 1 framework that we have as part of our onboarding pathway.
It’s about starting with a stronger, less manic foundation of understanding the working relationship, the role you have and what you want to hand out before you give them the complete history of the industry and your business in a week.
Then slowly, one by one, you hand over tasks, then processes, then entire responsibilities until you notice you’re no longer driving them to learn.
They are.
Hopefully, this has been helpful.
If you are hiring, if you’re trying to make a success of outsourcing or you’re trying to improve on it, you want to onboard someone really, really well, or you just want to know how to train people. These are two great tips that I wanted to share.
As always, if you want more information shoot me an email at stewart@audere.com.au
