How to Stop Wearing Multiple Hats in Your Business

To be effective, you have to stay fresh, clear your head, and develop new perspectives on business activity. A little time away from the business may be just what you need. Use temps and outsources.When it’s crunch time, call in the reserves. Don’t try to cover a heavy workload by piling more and more tasks on yourself or your employees. Use temps to handle the basics and specialists for one-offs, like revamping your website or managing a client appreciation event. Don’t let all your daily roles limit one of your most important responsibilities – strategic business development.

• Feeling overwhelmed by your calendar or systems?
• So make sure to take feedback from each member to know how well you’re performing at each front.
• Don’t scoff at it because your loved ones can help you push through it when you’re freaking out due to the insane workload.
• A one-time $5 billion company, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection and was subsequently acquired for $320 million by Dish Network.
• Merely laying out for your team the various hats you believe you wear & why and getting agreement on those can help relieve some of the tension and remove some of the hidden assumptions in your team.

I didn’t know it when I first started my business, but switching from a derby to a panama to a sombrero to a kangol to a fedora to a beret was killing my performance. As the CEO of ConsumerAffairs; the vice-president of sales, engineering, marketing and product; and the CFO, I had become accustomed to juggling six hats to keep the company on track. Although I was multi-tasking because I wanted to achieve more at my newly acquired enterprise, wearing multiple hats was actually causing a 40 percent drop in productivity. Juggling multiple roles can be taxing if you lack management or strategic skills.

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You not only want to know they’re being done, you want to know they’re being done correctly and in a timely fashion. Wearing multiple hats means more involvement and more time to understand your own business. You are more aware of the business, and it becomes easier to solve things inside or outside.

Relationships were strained and the quality of my work suffered. My mental and physical health wasn’t great either. Sonya Tapley has 15 years of accounting experience with both very small and very large organizations.

Illinois income tax rate owners and marketing executives have an incredible ability to multitask; they’re constantly pitching, posting on social media, typing up press releases, and optimizing Google ads. While balancing all this is impressive in the short term, it’s neither sustainable nor scalable for growth. Documenting what people do on a day-to-day basis — whether part of their job description or not — and how over-extended they are is crucial to understanding how and where they might benefit from automation. Mundane, high-volume daily tasks can then be automated using technologies such as robotic process automation or intelligent automation .

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Making the Most of the Middle Middle managers are often caught between the strategic and the tactical to deliver team performance and manage up. Now is an ideal time to turn these obstacles into opportunities. And in general, you’re OK with that because you like to know what’s going on. However, there are times when you’re pulled in about one million directions, and all those hats become more of a burden than an opportunity. Don’t miss out on the latest stories, tips, & actionable advice to help grow your business.

It means you should focus on the 20% of your job that makes you more money, makes you happier, and makes you more successful. But scaling a successful business isn’t about replicating what you’re doing. To stay with the visual, your hats are getting bigger, but you can’t just cut them in half and expect someone to wear all the hats you were and do the job in the same way. It’s about defining the many hats being worn by the owner and key employees that are overworked, documenting how to do that work, and finally, finding a person to fill that role.

How Do You Wear Multiple Hats?

You’ve got your parent hat, your work hat, your teacher hat, your friend hat, your sister hat, your coach hat, your babysitter hat, your partner hat… the list goes on, and looks different for everyone. We’re being asked to wear a lot of hats and it may feel unwise, negligent or impossible to say “No thanks, I’ve already got too many”. We have the knowledge and experience you need to help you with your business concerns. You can rely on us to take the burden off your head and shoulders so you can be the entrepreneur your business needs – not weighted down by tasks – quick on his feet and always looking ahead for opportunities. A business owner could be a technician or a manager every now and then but should never be tied down to being either or both.

Work better virtually with Dropbox’s Virtual First Toolkit, and explore their beta tools to create and collaborate more effectively with your team. Explicitly saying “I’m talking to you from my position as CFO” or “I’m talking to you from my position of VP of IT” immediately provides your team with the context in which to take your contribution. Sometimes a “no” the next time you’re ask to be involved is better than a half-hearted “yes” – and keep in mind that a “no” always implies a “yes” for something else.

And what we refer to as multitasking is simply just task switching. According to Psychology Today, ​​you can lose up to 40% of your productivity when multitasking, because your brain isn’t actually engaged in more than one thing at a time. Some of us are good at juggling many things at once, gliding from one creative project to another, and dealing with a variety of customers and clients. But we all have our limits, and if we feel too much pressure in our business, mistakes can happen. Since I acquired the firm in 2010, ConsumerAffairs has grown from 15 to more than 225 people.

You can’t do everything yourself – not if you want your business to grow. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ute Limacher-Riebold and Ute’s International Lounge with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. The owner of this site is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. I sometime combine them, but never more than two or three. If I would always wear them all I would belie my own expectations.

Keeping your workspace physically or digitally organized declutters your space and mind, making you efficient and clear-headed. Have separate filing cabinets in your office or separate files on your computer. If you’re not detail-oriented, you’ll waste time redoing things repeatedly without making progress. When there are problems or issues, your next step is often looking for the solution.

Plan for that time daily, either by yourself or with a well-run, short meeting of stakeholders. Here are some tips to keep more balls in the air as you juggle all the tasks you manage, while wearing all those different hats. CEOs are talented, but they can’t possibly be the most qualified person for every position in the company. Realizing that someone else is more capable than you are to handle a team or run a department is an important part of moving your company forward.

Should you follow your creative dreams, or should you be practical?

As a professional in any field, we all lose sleep at one time or another to be sure everything gets done. The problem is that too many business owners fail to respect the grave importance of getting sufficient sleep. The truth is that, as a small business owner, you will naturally find yourself handling all kinds of different tasks, being pulled in multiple directions at the same time. Even though that’s the case, you still shouldn’t have to destroy yourself in the process. Asking the questions “What’s the next action?” and “Who is responsible for that?” will go a long way to remove some of the confusion from you wearing multiple hats.

Collaborate with your team—internal and external—in real-time and easily access your content from anywhere. Upgrade to a Pro account for unlimited access to premium tools and content, including background remover, magic resize, social media scheduling and much more. Let’s say you have a hats-based peer-to-peer conversation, agree on a plan of action and then you sign off on it from your leadership position.

Friends and family are tremendously helpful to deal with elevated stress. Don’t scoff at it because your loved ones can help you push through it when you’re freaking out due to the insane workload. If you finish your primary tasks, and you’re left with the less important things, then you may be able to put off the latter to give yourself a little rest and take care of those other things at a later time. Store files and easily access them from all your devices with Dropbox. This cloud-based storage tool gives you ample secure storage, best-in-class sync technology and easy access from home, the office or on the road. You can also transfer large files, automatically back up your devices, send documents securely , get secure eSignatures and draft ideas in collaborative docs.

If you’re a wearer of multiple hats, take time off at regular intervals to rejuvenate. However you want to work around this, time will be an essential aspect of being a business owner. You can find plenty of time management apps on the internet to help you through the process.

Wearing many hats also means you need a large space to store them all. So your workspace is the closet where you stack all your files, documents, notes, tools, and other necessary work-related stuff. While there is no direct origin of who first said it, the phrase was used many years ago to refer to “jacks” or people who knew different things in life.