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October 11, 2011 at 11:29 AM
In the last post in our seven-part blog series on practice management, we discussed the best ways to translate your goals into actionable tasks. If you followed the principles laid out in that last post (and the two preceding it), you now have an effective road map to make changes that will give your practice real, measurable results. However, the next step toward achieving your goals is one that can make or break your plan: ensuring that you are assigning tasks to people who have the will, skill, knowledge and time to perform them.
The people who make up your practice are there for a reason—you’ve hand-selected them because they showed the potential to help you and your clients succeed. However, everyone has different strengths and workloads, so you need to take a good hard look at who is ready to take on each task that has to be completed. And, to put it simply, readiness is a combination of will, skill and time.
In our extensive experience working with advisors, the most common reason that goals aren’t achieved is that tasks aren’t effectively executed. Assigning these jobs to capable employees who don’t have the readiness to see them through could set back your goals or even be their downfall.
When you’re considering the distribution of tasks among your employees, you need to consider each person’s individual capabilities. You also need to make sure that they have the calendar space available to add new responsibilities to their existing duties. Keep in mind that will, skill and time in one area doesn’t necessarily translate to another. For example, a person might be great at preparing you for a client meeting, but could also have low readiness for taking on another task such as segmenting your client list.
There are many skillsets within your practice. A great employee who is competent working “in” the business—the necessary day-to-day functions or keeping things going—might not be competent in working “on” the business, say, planning a marketing campaign, which requires a different skillset and mindset.
