Outsourcing Work Can Make You More Productive
For one reason or another, outsourcing work has long been looked at as a sign of weakness.
When in reality, it shows that you’re focused on finding ways to maximize your outcomes by leveraging outsourced partners who focus primarily on the task that you’ve delegated to them.
In my opinion, outsourcing helps streamline processes and makes you more productive.
Whether you’ve never thought about outsourcing or thought about it and tabled the idea because you were afraid of what people would think, I believe that there are two overarching reasons you should consider outsourced partners.
The first is that you don’t have the experience or you don’t realize that you don’t have the experience.
While most people are comfortable hiring an outsourced partner to bring in expertise that they can’t provide on their own, there’s a large portion of people who are overconfident or lack the self-awareness to realize that they can’t take on the projects by themselves.
The problem is they often don’t have a good self-assessment in place that helps them realize their internal team doesn’t have the expertise to complete a task or a job function.
Their inability to see these holes in their department can and will lead to incomplete projects and an overall decline in productivity.
The second and perhaps the most important reason to outsource is that you don’t have the internal capacity.
This one is harder for people to admit and instead of admitting that outsourcing work can actually help their company and make them look good in the process, many people view it as a sign of weakness for them or their team if they admit they don’t have the internal capacity.
I actually credit my successes early on in my career to outsourcing work.
It was during those times when I leveraged outsourced partners to help get work done that I knew my team couldn’t handle at that time.
It wasn’t because I didn’t believe in my team’s capabilities. It was because we simply didn’t have the time and the necessary expertise to give those projects the effort, skill, and attention they needed to be completed and done well.
I was confident enough to use outside vendors and I didn’t have any problem giving them credit.
I believed and still believe to this day, that hiring outsourced partners helps maximize efficiencies.
Let’s face it, we all have the tendency to pretend that we can get to things when we know full well that we can’t.
We go into protection mode because we feel that the more work that’s on our plate, the more valuable we are to the team.
But, in reality, holding on to work that you know you can’t do is more of a hindrance than a help.
I believe that you should double down on your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.
When you focus too much on your weaknesses, you lose sight of what you’re actually good at and begin to struggle across the board.
Outsourcing, if presented in the right way, can be seen as a positive because you’re humble enough to admit that you and your team lack the experience or bandwidth to do it but that you’re taking a proactive approach to keeping the ball rolling in the right direction.
The main takeaway when it comes to outsourcing is to not let your pride or lack of self-awareness bottleneck your progress.
