As a small business grows the manager or owner will find it increasingly difficult to retain close control over all aspects of the business. Normally recruitment is initially made in order to respond to a particular need to take over or share a role that the business owner now has insufficient time to cope with. The common thread is that initially most small business owners do not recruit new skills - just an extra "pair of hands".

As further growth occurs the need for new skill sets is normally identified and a choice must be made whether to acquire those skills through specialist recruitment or by training and developing current staff.

It is when deciding between these approaches that the small business owner first considers how to allocate tasks to employees - and it is normal for it to be done with little thought for the future, but simply to meet current needs. At first tasks tend to be assigned in a very prescriptive way. Everything is required to be done exactly as the business owner would otherwise have done it. The logic is fairly persuasive - a growing business must be doing things right - and continuing to do what has brought that growth is a very safe option.

But is it a sensible one?

Continuing expansion normally exposes the fact that the fomer means of close control is both counter-productive and unsustainable and unless staff are allowed the freedom to use their talents it can lead to frustration - few people like to be closely directed in everything they do.

At some stage the business owner must face the fact that the business will not continue to grow in the same way as it did initially - and neither can he/she continue to oversee everything in minute detail. Further growth normally depends embracing staff development, allowing staff to use their own individual talents fully - and to find a way in which that can be done within a framework that best achieves the organisation's goals. This will increase the organsation's ability to respond to the unexpected and general flexibility.

Delegating tasks is an excellent way of developing staff - and done correctly staff can acquire new skills that benefit the organisation, and also exhibit heightened motivation with a corresponding sense of responsibility.

Whilst a manager cannot abdicate responsibility for tasks, the person to whom a task is delegated can be made responsible for the manner in which a delegated task is carried out - but this can only work if the task is dlegated in the right way.

It is a truism that if you give someone a task and prescribe every single aspect of how it is to be undertaken, then the person does not develop any sense of responsibility for that task. Without that you cannot expect people to make best use of their time whilst undertaking the tasks allotted to them. Why should they? However if you give a person the freedom to carry out and manage many aspects of the task then they will normally feel obliged to do so responsibly.

However the manager must be prepared to accept that in embarking along the road of staff development and delegation, then outcomes will not be entirely as they would have been had he/she undertaken the task personally. Within a small business this is not at all easy in many cases - the business owner is seldom very far removed from the task. To get used to this new regime, and indeed for the longer term, it is very often a good idea to define what is required from a delegated task within a range of acceptable outcomes.

Staff should be asked to undertake more copmplex tasks as they demonstrate their trusworthiness in handling what has already been delegated to them. It is vital that a manager plans ahead so staff are not asked to undertake tasks that they are not ready for.

When delegating tasks a number of aspects will be agreed, and among others these will be a defined range of acceptable outcomes and use of resources. Within the context of time management (there are others) your judgement as to whether the delegation was successful is limited just to these things: was the task completed within the range of acceptable outcomes (time used effectively) using the resources agreed (time used economically) and on time (time used efficiently).