Real Estate and Construction

Sharing responsibility

By Brian Horn

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Scott D. Bade
president, ImageSoft Inc.

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Scott D. Bade says learning to let go can be a big challenge of delegating, but it’s something you have to do if you want your company to succeed.

“You need to avoid the micromanaging,” says Bade, whose document management and workflow processing company employs about 50 people and has a three-year sales growth of 111 percent. “It doesn’t do much good to delegate and then to henpeck or be looking over people’s shoulders continuously. It’s not productive, and you really defeat the whole purpose of delegating. If you’re going to do it yourself, you might as well just have done it.”

Smart Business spoke with ImageSoft’s president and CEO about how to effectively delegate.

Q. How do you know which tasks to delegate?

You need to obviously establish roles for your key people, and then you need to be disciplined enough to give people tasks that fit in to their role.

Obviously, as an executive leader, you need to keep certain roles for yourself. Those are mainly oversight and strategic type roles.

Q. How do you monitor what you delegate?

It depends on the type of task you are talking about. We use electronic tools to track to-dos and things like that. If I give someone something, I’ll put it in a particular file to make sure that I circle back on it, if it is important enough.

The day-to-day stuff, you can’t necessarily track every little thing that you give people. So you make strategic decisions on what are the most important things you need to follow up on.

If you try to follow up more at a high level based on measurable goals, instead of following up just to say, ‘Yes or no. Did you do this?’ — the results are what should show. So, if you are setting the right kind of goals for staff, then that will show when you look at, for instance, sales numbers or customer satisfaction ratings, different types of things like that.