So you’ve hired your new assistant and assigned her first few tasks. She’s completed them, and when you review them, you can’t help but feel disappointed with how they turned out.

You wonder to yourself, “Did I say something that didn’t make sense or did she just not know how to do what I was asking?”

It could be that adequate information wasn’t provided or that she got confused during the process.

Instead of letting this happen over and over again or letting your assistant go and reverting back to doing everything yourself, experiment with these three effective strategies for working with your new team member.

Strategy 1: Assign a task and specify the outcome.

This technique is for tasks with no pre-set procedures for getting to the end point. Meaning, you only tell your assistant what you envision the end result will look like and let her come up with her own process for how to get there.

For example, if you want her to write twenty Twitter updates based on the past five articles you published, instead of telling her exactly which paragraphs to use in the articles, you can just tell her to write four tweets per article that will make someone curious or excited to click on the link to read the article.

Giving her the end result and letting her create their own process, offers your assistant the space to be creative, and you get the results you’re looking for without micromanaging.

Strategy 2: Outline the task and give thorough instructions.

Take this route if the path of reaching the outcome is as crucial as the outcome itself.

This technique will be more useful for routine tasks like publishing a new blog post on WordPress. There are specific actions an assistant needs to take like filling out the SEO or choosing the right categories, which will ensure successful completion of the tasks.

If you let her choose her own process here, she might not have any idea of what to do and could disrupt the necessary uniformity of the task.

This tactic is also useful if you already have outlined processes, which would save your assistant time.  For example, here is the checklist my assistant is working with when uploading articles on systemsrock.com.

Telling your assistant what the task is and exactly how to do it simplifies things for her and eradicates the disappointment you feel if things aren’t done exactly the way they need to be done.

Strategy 3: Break down the task into small parts and approve/give feedback as each part is completed.

This approach is great for complex projects which require walking your assistant through the entire project while setting small milestones and moving forward as each one is achieved.

For example, if you’re launching a new product, milestones might include putting together a social media marketing plan, loading the status updates into Hootsuite, and monitoring customer engagement on Twitter.

Breaking big projects into small steps and providing feedback makes them feel more manageable to you and your assistant.

Back to You

Have you experimented with any of these techniques with your team? What other tactics might you add?