I recently stepped back from the day-to-day running of the business, and took on the Chair role. Relinquishing some control was one of the best decisions I made as a leader. My team are thriving without me!
And honestly, it’s such a fantastic feeling to see your team doing well and to know that you helped that happen by stepping away. And the bonus is you can have time away to focus on other new ventures or the wider strategy and return to find things running amazingly well without you.
At first, it can be hard on the ego to find out you’re not as needed as you thought you were. What do you mean, my team’s doing well without me?! But when you give people the space (and tools) to work things out on their own, they can start to get creative, make mistakes and learn. It’s the quickest path to innovation. You’ll start to love it.
Default to trust
Hopefully, you trust that the person you hired is qualified and motivated to do a good job.
Everyone has bad days, and perfect doesn’t exist, so issues will crop up now and again. But unless someone does something to break your trust, it’s best to believe in your team and their abilities. (If you don’t, you might want to look at why that is. It will hold you back in the long-run.)
Give people what they need to succeed
The key is to ensure that everyone on your team has the tools, training and motivation to succeed.
- Communication – have you set clear expectations and communicated everything in a way that the individual will understand best? Everyone hears things in different ways, and you’re likely to have neurodiverse team members and people who think differently. For example, some people are very literal, others receive information in a more general way. Some people find it hard to adapt to change, and others embrace it. Find the best way to communicate to each member of your team based on their needs, not yours.
- Suitability – have you got the right people in the right roles? A creative person is likely to have very different soft skills and working styles to an analytics or data person. You need both, just make sure they’re doing the job best suited to them, and that those leading teams have the empathy to understand different working styles and motivation of their direct reports..
- Decision making – are you the only person with all the answers to a problem? Think about how you can empower other people to make good decisions and access the information they need to answer questions from their teams.
- Resources – does your team have the right time set aside to do the job well, the right people, the budget and the permission to do it how they see fit?
- Psychologically safe working – if you are empowering people to take accountability and make strategic decisions, they need to be safe doing so, even if they fail. A psychological safe culture will support people even when things go wrong, and let them learn and grow. If you’re not afraid of failing, you’ll come up with ideas. A safe culture fosters innovation.
By building and supporting a confident, assertive and self-sufficient team, you free up time to focus on growing the business. Your team feels more trusted, and they have the space to innovate and flourish.
