Delegation is the single most important skill for a business owner to master - and most business owners (including your clients) won't be very good at it. Here are some reasons you will be given and some suitable responses: My employees will make mistakes.   Of course they will.  That’s how you learned.  Support them so that they don’t make big mistakes I do not have the right staff, they are not up to it.   From experience I suggest that this may be the case, but probably isn’t.  Employees’ performance usually reflects their manager’s capability.  Leaders understand that people live up to (or down to) their leader’s expectations. It is quicker to do it myself.   Well, it might take you an hour to show someone else what takes you five minutes – but if you don’t invest that hour you will still be doing it yourself in one year or ten years It’s cheaper to do it myself.   This is clearly nonsense unless your time is worth le...

Some of your clients may ask about the benefits of appraisals and how to do them.  This shows they understand that developing their business means developing their employees, which is good.  Don't just rush into appraisals though. A client who owned a fast-growing business once said to me that he was concerned that he hadn’t had time to “do all the HR things I should do” for the past couple of years. Two years before, business growth was being hampered by quality and delivery problems. His staff were avoiding answering the phone because they knew it would be an angry customer. Sales, Design and Operations were at loggerheads. The company did have, however, lots of HR stuff going on. Appraisals, reviews, training and so forth ran like clockwork and my client devoted a lot of his time to HR initiatives. We spent a lot of time when I started working with him talking about structure and how to solve the customer service issues. He had an effective project manager (he called him “a...