To grow your company, you must delegate

The bad news is that this growth has a downside. As you point out, it's getting harder to manage everything on your own.

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Every business that grows from its entrepreneurial beginnings to a more mature entity faces challenges. Managing a larger company is one of them. While you recognize that it's essential to delegate more tasks to others and perhaps to appoint managers over specific areas, your employees, who have grown accustomed to a personal relationship with you, apparently don't see it this way.

To introduce a change of this sort, the first thing you'll need to do is convince employees that a new approach is required. Tell them that as much as you have valued having one-on-one relationships with them, in the future you won't be as involved in each employee's daily operations. There simply aren't enough hours in the day.

To help sell the need for change, cite some recent examples of missed opportunities for customers or problems that weren't solved quickly enough because employees depended on you instead of taking action on their own or working as a team to develop a solution. Invite employees to identify other instances where the need to involve you may have limited the company's product or customer service quality or productivity.

Once you sell the need for a new structure, assure employees that most of their daily work won't be changing that much ? just their reporting relationship.

Let them know that you'll still play an integral role in the work of the company, but that, to manage the company's growth, your role must change.

Highlight that the new structure will enable the company to be more responsive to the needs of both customers and employees. Invite employees to offer ideas for improving and strengthening the new structure, but don't back down on the direction you intend to move the company.

The last piece you need to put into place involves methods for reinforcing the new management structure, reporting relationships and employee behaviors.

Once you've made the change, you need to religiously honor the new reporting relationships, select the right people as your managers and train them in their new supervisory roles. Just giving them a new title won't make them competent managers. You need to invest in their people management skills.

Finally, you need to provide incentives to your employees so they begin to experience positive results from working in the new way. These incentives shouldn't be financial. Instead, they could include granting people more independence and autonomy, trusting them with greater authority and responsibility, and increasing the availability of flexible work hours.

Getting your staff to embrace the new structure will take time; however, if you select the right managers, build the right managerial skills, explain the reasons for the change, and reinforce the new behaviors, we know you'll be successful.