[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”George S. Patton”]Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. [/pullquote]
Tom founded a placement firm who loved the nearly all aspects of his business, right down to the monthly eNewsletter. Unfortunately, he had a tendency to meddle shadow (er, hover. OK, meddle) so much in the efforts of his team that they never had to do much thinking for themselves. Over time, Tom found that he was losing contact with key customers because he simply didn’t have the time needed to keep existing customers informed and satisfied. He was so preoccupied with activities that could easily be called “micromanaging” his team’s efforts, that the things that only he could do kept falling lower and lower on the priority list.
When You Micromanage, You’re Stealing from Yourself
Do you find that you’re spending so much time helping your managers overcome the basics that there’s no time to focus on growth and innovation? Are you dedicating effort and resources to solving tiny problems while bigger ones aren’t even being addressed? Do you wonder why your company seems to be stuck in a rut with no way forward?
It’s time for you to step out of the role of “Chief Problem Solver” so you can accomplish the tasks that only you can accomplish, your company can move forward, and your managers can step up to more responsibility.
It’s Time to Start Delegating
Delegation is the best friend of every leader. It’s key to getting you and your team to where you need to go. Look at it this way. You’ve taken the time to hire talented and skilled people to help run your company, you should let them do the kind of work that they’ve been hired to do. Assign them tasks and let them do it, and watch as you are suddenly freed up to focus on more important problems, problems only you can solve.
As a leader, it’s your job to set your team’s course towards its destination, and then to circle back and make minor adjustments as needed. As captain of this ship, it’s your duty to make sure that everything is proceeding as it should be, it is not your job to also mop the deck, and cook the food, and manage inventory. By focusing on these smaller tasks, tasks that your managers are trained to do, you are not only wasting their time and skills but preventing yourself from giving the attention to the bigger picture.
Trust Your Managers
It may be tempting to think that nobody does it as well as you do, that if you don’t micromanage then something will go amiss. You have to let go of this mentality. This sort of toxic mindset relies on distrust. If your managers don’t feel like you trust them to do the work that they’ve been hired to do, then this creates an environment where they won’t be able to perform at a high level. However, if you assign them tasks and then trust that they will take care of it to the standards you require, then they will rise to the challenge. Sure, they may have questions and feedback along the way, which you can occasionally step in to answer and respond to, but ultimately, leaving them to their work forces them to think creatively about problems as they arise, and forces them into taking care of problems on their own.
This doesn’t mean that to let your managers do their jobs that you need to be an absentee leader. On the contrary, you will definitely want to check in with your managers at predetermined intervals, or after certain milestones are reached, to check on progress and make small adjustments as needed. Then, they can take your feedback, implement it, and make more progress while you are able to do what needs to be done in regards to the bigger picture.
Once Tom made the shift to lead his managers instead of micromanaging them, he found that he had the time he needed to not only keep existing customers’ happy, but he also was able to be the face of the company and bring in more work while his managers handled the day-to-day operations of the business.
About Grow Business Now
At Grow Business Now, we work with senior leaders of privately held companies with scalable business models who want to overcome the 6 big obstacles to growth in record time.