The Three Branches of Delegation: Run Your Firm More Efficiently and Empower Your Team

Journal of Financial Planning: November 2024

Jessica Colston, PCC, is an executive business coach with Carson Coaching. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Grand Valley State University and a master’s in leadership and organizational development from the University of Texas at Dallas. She’s passionate about partnering with firm owners to bridge the gap between their current situation and their desired success. Carson Coaching is the exclusive coaching partner of the Financial Planning Association. For more information, visit www.carsongroup.com/coaching.

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Delegation is hard for firm owners. You’ve built your business, and you likely have an emotional attachment to it, so it’s hard to step back and allow someone else to create a different version of what you’ve been doing. 

Because you’re used to doing things a certain way, you may have blinders on to how those ways could be holding back your firm. Through delegation, you may discover your team does things differently, better, more logically, and more efficiently. Delegation can allow you to rethink things and empower your team. 

Effective delegation is essential for you to enhance productivity and be able to focus on your core competencies—the things that only you can do. By strategically distributing tasks across three distinct branches—your internal team, artificial intelligence (AI), and gig workers—you can create a well-rounded approach that maximizes efficiency. 

Delegating to your team fosters collaboration and skill development while ensuring that responsibility remains within the organization. Incorporating AI tools can speed up routine tasks, giving you extra time for more strategic decision-making. Finally, turning to gig workers adds flexibility and access to specialized skills tailored to specific project needs at a lower cost. Embracing this multifaceted delegation strategy can significantly elevate your firm’s operational success.

Benefits of Delegation

When starting your delegation journey, know that delegation is not micromanagement. Delegation requires you to give your team some freedom and flexibility. To start, you need to define what things you want to delegate.

Forbes reports that delegation is a necessary skill for leaders to develop and that if you’re having difficulty with it, try to see it as an investment in you and your team. Many leaders make excuses for why they can’t delegate—including not having time, feeling like they can do it faster than anybody, or they’ve previously tried unsuccessfully to delegate.¹

But it’s imperative to take the first step and start delegating today because the benefits far outweigh any negatives. Three benefits come to mind immediately: 

1. You have to let go to grow. Many leaders aren’t spending their time doing the right high-value activities. But as a leader, you have to let go of tasks you may like doing so that you can focus on the tasks that only you can do. Doing so will allow you—as the leader, CEO, or adviser—more space and opportunity to really focus on your strategic vision and become a better leader. This helps both you and your team grow.
2. Clients prefer to work with a team. Clients love to know they have a team working on their planning and investing. You can delegate communication and client-facing work to team members so they can build better rapport and bonds with clients, allowing them to offer better service. Plus, it will allow team members to do things they are good at. 
3. It keeps your team engaged. Delegation not only helps team members develop, grow, and get new opportunities, but it also keeps them engaged. When tasks are mundane and team members are not challenged, they might get bored and look for outside opportunities that have room for growth. Offering team members new responsibilities through delegation—even if it’s just a small component of work you’ve previously done—can help keep people engaged and encourage them to stay.

To teach your team how to do the tasks, you could do the task while the team member observes, have them do the task while you observe, and then offer feedback. Then they can do the task on their own. This is where it’s critical to be careful you’re not micromanaging. 

How to Identify What to Delegate and Delegating to Your Team

Now that you’ve decided that you should delegate, you need to decide what to delegate. 

Carson Coaching has a list of 100 things every adviser should delegate, from clerical tasks like scheduling appointments to marketing tasks like designing invitations to client events.² But if you’d rather design your own list of tasks to delegate, there are a few ways I like to advise my coaching members to do this: 

1. On a spreadsheet, list all your current job duties and then rate whether you enjoy or don’t enjoy each one. All the tasks you don’t enjoy are ripe for delegating. Second, highlight all tasks only you can perform. Be honest here. These are those high-value growth tasks that you can’t delegate. 
2. Then, once you determine all the tasks that other people can do and that you don’t enjoy doing, you can begin doling those out based on your team members’ roles. Assessments like Kolbe can help you understand how your team members naturally approach their work.³ If you delegate tasks that align with the types of work that come naturally to your team members, it makes things more efficient and enjoyable. We’ve all likely experienced a time when we’ve had to do tasks beyond our natural abilities—it’s tiring and time consuming. Figuring out what tasks your team has a knack for and is good at can help you figure out what things on your delegation list you can assign to them. 

This exercise can also help you uncover gaps in skill sets and figure out the next hire your team needs. Approaching delegation like this is also a good way to get your future organizational planning started. It gives you a head start on engaging your team, looking for your next hires before there’s a critical need, and putting the right people in the right seats. 

Delegating to AI 

We know that artificial intelligence isn’t going to replace advisers or team members anytime soon, but Forbes reports that humans who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t know how to use AI. Furthermore, delegating some tasks to AI is becoming increasingly more important across industries—including ours.⁴

Learning how to use AI for delegation can make you more efficient, but you first need to know your company’s policies and procedures. Then you need to understand the skills necessary to be successful with AI delegation. 

“AI is a tool—perhaps the most useful and powerful one that will emerge during our lifetimes,” writes Bernard Marr in Forbes. “By mastering it and learning to use it effectively, we can enjoy careers that are more productive, interesting, and rewarding.”

Asset-Map suggests the following to help select the right tools for your firm:⁵

1. Select tools that align with your current needs and practice areas. 
2. Offer training for your team on the tools to fully take advantage of the benefits. 
3. Evaluate regularly to ensure the tool is doing what you need it to do, then adjust accordingly. 

As our industry is slower to adapt to adding new technology, you can start using generative AI, which is the type of AI that can create new content like text, images, audio, and videos, to do basic tasks like researching data, building marketing content calendars, creating blog post outlines, drafting emails, finding quotes for presentations, or getting an understanding of consumer sentiment on topical issues. 

Dani Fava, chief strategy officer at Carson Group, emphasizes that generative AI significantly enhances communication tasks for advisers. This includes activities like composing emails, drafting call scripts, and summarizing PDFs. By leveraging this technology, advisers can increase their efficiency and effectiveness in client interactions.

Delegating to Gig Workers

Incorporating freelance or gig workers into your firm is a cost-effective way to enhance flexibility and tap into their deep and specialized expertise. 

By engaging gig workers on a project basis, you can fill skills gaps on your team, allowing you to scale up or down without the long-term commitment of permanent hires. Additionally, utilizing gig workers eliminates the overhead costs associated with full-time employees, such as benefits and office space.

The Great Resignation saw many skilled professionals pivot to gig work, seeking more control over their schedules and work environments. This shift has made it easier for businesses to tap into a diverse talent pool that brings fresh perspectives and specialized skills. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr are excellent resources for finding these professionals. You can consider delegating to any of the following types of gig workers: 

Virtual assistants. Virtual assistants can handle various tasks such as event planning, data entry, and scheduling, freeing up your time to focus on more strategic activities. When working with sensitive client information, ensure compliance by anonymizing data and setting clear boundaries about what can be shared.

Marketing professionals. Most financial advisers aren’t marketing experts. Hiring a marketing professional can elevate your firm’s branding, content creation, and social media engagement. They can help with SEO, website design, and even converting long-form content like blogs into short, engaging social media posts. 

Paraplanners/planning. Kitces.com reports that financial advisers oftentimes outsource financial planning to outside firms to increase their own capacity.⁶ Some advisers will work with these outsourced planners, who create the plan and will be present for the meeting with the client. 

Content creation. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr make it easy to find skilled professionals. Upwork is ideal for long-term projects and allows you to review a freelancer’s past work and client feedback. Fiverr, on the other hand, is perfect for one-time tasks and offers a wide range of services from ghostwriting articles and blogs to video editing. 

By leveraging gig workers, your financial planning firm can operate more efficiently, reduce operational costs, and access a diverse range of talents that can drive your business forward. Take the first step today and explore how gig workers can help you level up your firm. 

Go Forth and Delegate

Delegation can be challenging for firm owners who are deeply invested emotionally in their firms. You might not want to step back and let your team, AI, or gig workers help you out, but embracing delegation not only empowers teams, it can also lead to more efficient and innovative approaches to work. Plus, delegation gives you the time to do the high-value things only you can do. And delegation can enhance productivity and allow you to focus on planning and executing your strategy.

Overall, adopting a structured delegation strategy is essential for your firm’s operational success, better client service, and both your individual and your team’s growth.   

Endnotes

1. Briody, Patrick. 2023, August 15. “Breaking The Delegation Barrier: Unraveling the Top 5 Excuses Holding Leaders Back.” Forbes. www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2023/08/15/breaking-the-delegation-barrier-unraveling-the-top-5-excuses-holding-leaders-back/.
2. Download the “100 Items to Delegate” resource at https://resources.carsongroup.com/hubfs/Carson%20Coaching%20Online/JFP%20Generic%20Resources/FPA_NOV%2024_100%20Items%20to%20Delegate%20Exercise.pdf.
3. Learn more about Kolbe assessments at www.kolbe.com. 
4. Marr, Bernard. 2023, June 19. “AI Delegation: The One Skill You Will Need to Succeed in the Future.” Forbes. www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/06/19/ai-delegation-the-one-skill-you-will-need-to-succeed-in-the-future/.
5. Asset-Map. 2024, June 20. “AI for Financial Advisors: Embracing the Future Without Fear.” www.asset-map.com/blog/ai-for-financial-advisors. 
6. Van Deusen, Adam. 2023, September 11. “Outsourcing (Parts of) the Financial Plan Preparation Process to Boost Solo Advisor Capacity.” Kitces.com www.kitces.com/blog/outsourcing-financial-plan-preparation-solo-financial-advisor-time-wellbeing-capacity-wall/.