If your company is ready to gear up for new growth, one of the fastest and most effective ways to optimize output without increasing costs is to institute strategic delegation practices. Strategic delegation is an often-overlooked management tool that has the potential to dramatically improve productivity and employee satisfaction in most companies.

To get started, every strategic player, from the CEO on down, first assesses his or her tasks, prioritizes these activities based on their importance to the company's success, eliminates the non-essential tasks altogether and delegates to others parts of the essential tasks they are responsible for. This frees them up to work on improving the business, not just completing tasks.

Here's an example. We discovered that the sales reps at a point-of-sale display manufacturing company spent only 10 hours a week selling. How could the company increase sales when their sales reps spent the majority of their time following up on sales, filling out paperwork, making sure the plant did the job correctly, and generating reports? Instead of recruiting new sales reps, who would take months to get up to speed given the complex product line, we suggested the company first improve the current staff's output.

Once the company implemented strategic delegation, the non-sales employees were able to assume responsibility for such tasks as managing the plant and streamlining order and reporting activities. This had the immediate effect of doubling the effectiveness of the sales force, all without having to recruit and train new sales reps.

Strategic delegation works in all areas of a business. We've used this as a standard approach to resolve bottlenecks in sales, product development, and engineering -- all functions requiring very specialized skills that are hard to recruit.

Another client, the president of a manufacturer of plastic liners and sealants, wanted his team to spend more time working on the business, rather than in it. We set a target of freeing up 20 hours per month for each executive. To do this, we had all team members identify five things they believed could free up 20 hours' time for each other team member -- five tasks to be delegated to someone else. Each executive then took his or her combined list of suggested tasks, identified which tasks they believed could truly be delegated and save 20 hours, and worked out a plan to delegate these tasks to staff members. Within six months, each executive was spending much more time working on the business.

What happens when companies don't delegate strategically?

• Time management becomes a problem.
• Top performers cannot handle more high-potential activities.
• Individuals attempt to accomplish too much and get burned out.
• Quality of work diminishes dramatically.
• Deadlines are missed.
• Opportunities to create meaningful and rewarding assignments for each staff member are overlooked.

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