How to Not Always Be Needed (Episode 12)

Resources

The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr., & Hal Burrows

Transcript

Hey, so the other week I went to a conference, and I heard the same message from a couple of people.

One person was someone I met just at the conference and he happened to tell me about what was going on with him. And another person was somebody on stage kind of confessing to the same issue.

And the thing that they both struggled with was this, that they can’t seem to get away from their business.

That their team is basically dependent on them, that every morning they wake up and their phones exploding with fires or texts or things going on, or people keep calling them about questions or what to do in this situation. And they just can’t seem to get away.

So in this podcast, I wanted to kind of give just a few suggestions about what you can do to help you do that. What process, what steps you can take so that you can get to the point where you can leave and your team’s able to handle it themselves without having to depend on you.

And that’s actually what you want as a leader.

You don’t want to be “indispensable”

Sometimes leaders want to be indispensable. They want it to that people depend on them, that the company can’t work without them. And that’s the wrong mentality.

Good leaders develop their team so that they can be productive without them. That’s one of the signs of a good leader, that you’re able to develop them so that you can leave and that they can do it without you.

They aren’t dependent on you. You’ve helped lead them and grow them to that point.

Why are you “needed?”

So, and the first step that you need to take is ask why. Why is it that you’re in this situation where you can’t leave?

So here’s some questions to think about, kind of similar to that along those lines. To think about, not everything will apply to you. Not everything necessarily is the reason that your team and your situation is the way it is, but it’s something to think about to see if it might be. Okay?

And some of these might be kind of hard hitting maybe, depending how you look at it, but they’re important to point out or to think about. So, first question.

• Why can’t the people below you or your team do it?
• Why can’t they handle it themselves?
• What’s preventing them?
• Is it that they don’t have the training?
• That they don’t have the authority?
• That they don’t have the knowledge or the processes to follow?
• Is it that you don’t trust them?
• Maybe you have a bunch of people on your team that you don’t trust and you don’t think they can handle it themselves. Is that a trust issue on you?
• Did you not hire the right people?
• Did they need to be trained?
• What’s the issue with that lack of trust?
• Why can’t you trust them to do it?
• Why aren’t they at that level?
• Do you fear that people will just mess up?
• Is it a sense of control that you’re afraid people are gonna mess up, they’re gonna make a mistake, you have to control everything, to make sure everything’s done the right way? Is that the reason?
• Are people dependent on you to solve all their problems?
• Anytime they have a problem or issue, do they always come to you and you solve it for them?
• Is there an insecurity you have maybe that you feel like you have to be needed so you want people to depend on you because it fulfills the insecurity in you?
•  Is it some kind of ego?
• And some of these things can be between insecurity and ego, but for ego, do you have to be in charge?
• Do you have to be able to prove that you’re the leader, that you’re the one that make the decisions?

And if you don’t make the decisions, if you’re not the one making the choices, you’re afraid it’s going to make you look bad. Or maybe because you’re the leader, you feel like you have all the answers and the others don’t. They aren’t as smart or as good as you. So you have to be the one to solve everything.

• Is it that your processes are not set up?
• Do you not have good processes that people can follow to help solve certain issues?

Those are some questions. Just take time to think about what is the reason why you are in the situation you’re in.

It’s not necessarily bad you’re in that situation. It’s just that you are.

• What’s the reason behind it?
• Do your people just need more training?
• Do you need to hire different people?
• Do you need to move people to different seats?
• Do you have some stuff in you that you need to fix?

Whatever it is, think about those and then start working to fix them.

Somes steps you can take

So now I’ll offer some other suggestions too, but if you don’t find the core reason why, you know, if everybody’s just new, then that kind of makes sense, you have to build them up. But if you don’t find the reason why, it’s gonna be hard to solve it.

So like ideally, this is kind of the overall. You want to hire the right people, you want to train them, you wanna have good processes set up they can follow, and then trust them to do it.

That’s ideal of how you want it run. And you need to work on that.

So if you have people that you don’t trust in your team, then maybe you didn’t hire well.

• Are they just in the wrong seat?
• Do they need to go?
• Do they just need training?
• What needs to go with those people to make them what they need to be?
• Do you need to let some go?

Whatever it is, make sure you have the right people. You want to train your people, and whatever it is in their job, they will handle the different situations.

Help people learn to solve problems

But part of that is, you want to help people learn to solve their own problems. Sometimes leaders take it on themselves to solve everybody’s problem. And there’s different reasons that that could happen, but for whatever reason it is, that’s what they do.

People have a problem, they come to them, the leader takes it upon themselves to solve it themselves. And that’s a poor practice. You want to be able to train your people to handle their own problems.

When people come to you with a problem, don’t just solve it for them. Help them solve it. Guide them into solving the problem, but don’t just do it for them.

There’s a one minute manager book on this topic. I think it’s called The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. And the concept is, is when you take other people’s problems, you’re taking their monkeys.

And over time, you get overloaded with these monkeys because you’re solving everybody’s problems for them instead of helping them solve their problem. I think the monkey was the next step in the problem.

You want to get them where they can solve their own problems. Because when you get to that point where you train them and guide them in the process, whatever it may be, then that’s good for them because that helps them in their career, that helps them in their job, that helps them as a person be more engaged, more confident, being able to solve their own problems versus being dependent on you.

And it also frees up your time to be able to do what’s most important for you. So do that as much as you can. Help them solve their own problems.

Now, there’s a saying that sometimes happens, and I’ve actually put this in some blogs, and it’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s one of those things that you have to be careful about. And it’s a saying that, if you come to me with a problem, come with a solution as well.

The idea of it is, you want them to think of a solution instead of just coming to you with a problem. The problem with that is, there’s some problems that you want to know about immediately, and you don’t want them to wait to figure out a solution for it, because sometimes that’s not their position to solve some of the problems that happen.

So however you want to do it, if you want them to come to you with problems and you just guide them, if you say, hey, try to come up with a solution, if it’s this level of problem, but if it’s up this level, come talk to me, however you want to do it, but try to help people solve their own problems.

Build a good culture

You want to build a culture of growth and learning. You want a culture where mistakes are OK, the right kind of mistakes. If someone’s lazy, that’s different than people trying, putting their best effort, chasing after new ideas and making mistakes along the way.

That’s completely different.

You want the right kind of mistakes because that means people are trying and growing and you want to encourage people in that. The thing is when you release people to help solve their own problems and stuff, mistakes are going to happen sometimes and that’s okay.

You don’t need to have a culture where people fear making mistakes because you’re gonna have a poor culture in that. You may need to have a gradual release like as they’re learning, as they’re growing, you may slowly release the level of problems that the mistakes aren’t like deadly for your business.

 But you want to be able to encourage them to try, make mistakes and get better and release them as you need to.

Create a playbook

Another idea is to create kind of a playbook or standards that people can follow along. So for example, you face a certain situation, there’s an issue, whether you kind of solve it or you meet with your team and you all solve the issue, whatever you all do, you write it down.

You’ll discuss it, write it down, boom.

And over time, it comes like a playbook of, here’s the situation, here’s how we solved it. And it can be a guide to help people when they face other similar situations or in different scenarios.

And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a black and white thing,  you have to do it this way, but definitely could be a guideline.

And of course, some things, depending what it is, may be a black and white thing, how to handle certain situations. But some that don’t necessarily have to be.

But that’s an idea so that as people go, hey, I’m not sure what to do in this situation. Boom, here’s this playbook. Okay, this is what we’ve done in other situations.

And as new employees come in, they can look at the playbook and be like, okay, this is the kind of the way, the processes, this is the way we do things here.

And when I talk about processes, I’m not talking about a lot of the bureaucracy a lot of organizations have that hurt productivity instead of help. Any process you build should be beneficial. It should help solve problems.

It should help people be more productive. You know, if you have a lot of people writing blogs, you probably want some kind of standard and some ways that people follow to make it easier to edit.

You know, this is the way our format and stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. So processes can be good as long as it helps people be more productive, solve problems and so on.

So if the problem of course is ego, if it’s insecurity, something of those, a sense of control, that’s something you need to work on in yourself. If you feel like you have to control everything, or if you feel like it’s gonna make you look bad if you don’t make a decision or have some kind of say in everything, you need to learn to let that go, because it’s not true.

The more you control, the less productive your people are gonna be. The more you hold on, try to make all the decisions yourself, over time, you’re gonna lose people, but your people are gonna be less productive and less engaged.

If you’re arrogant, that hurts you.

So those are things that you need to work on if that’s what you struggle with yourself.

In summary…

So, kind of in summary, if you’re facing the situation where you are constantly needed, some steps, first step is to ask why.

Why are you in that situation? What’s the cause, what’s the core roots of that situation?

And once you do that, work to move to fix it. Some other tips that can apply to that are just that are kind of basics of things you can do is of course hire the right people, you know, put them in the right seats, train them, have good processes, and then trust the people to do it.

Have a culture of learning and growth where people are allowed to make mistakes, gradually release if you need to. Help people learn to solve their own problems instead of you solving it yourself.

 If it’s helpful, create those, that playbook, the standards, have those set processes that people can follow or be a guide for people.

Whatever it may be, look at your problem and take the steps you need so that you can grow your team to be a high functioning team that can run without you because you have taught them how to make good decisions, to solve problems, and to handle the different situations that may come along.

I hope this helps. I’ll see you next time.