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Transcript
Are you the easy button for your employees? When your team comes to you with a problem or decision to be made, what’s your response?
It can be easy as a leader to want to give advice, to be helpful, tell people what to do, solve the problem for them, be the next step, I’ll solve this for you, I’ll do this for you, or even take back the task that you’ve given them. And sometimes that may seem helpful, some of those things that you can do may seem helpful, but really it’s not.
Because when you do that, when you take the problems on, the next steps, decision-making, what you do is make it where your team is dependent on you. They aren’t critically thinking, they’re not learning in their decision-making, they’re relying on you, and it gets to a situation where without you, your team is not able to function as well.
It makes it harder where you as the leader can get away. It overloads you in the work and it can keep you from doing what’s important for your job. And again, it keeps your team from growing and learning in their problem solving and their critical thinking and their decision making.
Don’t take the monkey
Ken Blanchard and a couple other authors in the book, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, they tell a story about this manager who is overworked, who’s overwhelmed, working overtime, the weekends and everything to get things done. Yet his employees are just leaving and not having to work. And he’s wondering what’s going on? Why is he so stressed and overwhelmed?
And he realized and he finds out that the reason is, is because he keeps taking the monkey from the employees. Now the monkey is the next step. And so what was happening with that manager is when the employee came to them about an issue or problem or whatever it may be, that manager would take that monkey from them and put it on him to fix the next step or take the next step or do the next thing.
What happened then is he became overwhelmed and overworked because he was doing all that for his employees, and his employees were just there waiting for him to take that step to be able to continue.
What you want to do, in general, is for your employees to leave with the monkeys. They have the next step. They have the next task they have to do. That needs to be done. Yes, as a leader, there may be times when you have to do something because of your position, but in general, you want your employees to leave with the next step.
Don’t solve problems or decide for them
It’s similar with problems and decision-making. Instead of you giving advice or solving the problem for them, you want to help them solve it themselves and to be able to make the decisions themselves.
Instead of giving advice or telling people what to do, you should ask questions. What do you think is the main issue? What steps have you taken? What steps do you think you should take? What might be some good solutions? What are reasons that might work or might not work? And so on.
Ask questions and help them think through the decision they have to make or think through the problem they’re solving so that on their own or with your guidance, they’re able to solve the problems.
When you do this, it grows them in their thinking and ability to solve problems and ability to make good decisions. And then they get to a point where they’re not relying on you as much because they’re able to do it themselves. Then you have competent people who can take care of issues whether you’re there or not.
Yes, there may be times that you do need to give advice and there may be times that you need to solve the problem. But your ultimate goal is not to be that easy button, that they come to you, push that button and you take over for them or you solve it for them. Your goal is to help them learn and grow to be able to do it themselves on their own.
Are you the easy button?
Because if so, it’s time to change that. See you next time.
