“I can take a month off from work without anything stopping!”
No fingers crossed, how often can you say that? Do you feel like you just need to be there to make sure things get done right? Now, we’re going to tell you exactly what you want to hear: it’s not you, it’s them.
Then, we’ll spoil your good mood and tell you that probably you have created the situation and only you can do something about it. Before you can trust and let go, you need to make sure you are putting your trust in the right people.
The first step is to make sure you recruit self-driven people who are willing and able to take responsibility. The next move is to offer those self-driven people enough freedom and responsibility.
Are you sure your team has enough space to step up and deliver something great? It’s natural to struggle with letting go of your power but necessary to do so if you ever want your business to scale.
Learn to enjoy being led
To make yourself redundant as a leader, you need to learn to enjoy being led. For that to happen, you need to trust your employees and let them do their magic.
How to get there? You know you are on your way to enjoying being led when you’ve:
- Co-created shared goals and let your team decide how to work together to achieve them
- Recruited self-driven and proactive people who don’t need to be managed
- Given your employees the freedom to excel in what they do and offered them necessary support to do so
- Ensured that everyone in your team understands that with freedom comes responsibility, ready to carry that responsibility
If you’re already done all this and you’re enjoying the ride, most likely this approach is also reflected in your business results.
If you still feel like you need to be involved in planning, deciding and implementing, or those magic moments of carefree freedom are a rare treat, make sure that:
- Your daily decisions are based on shared values to which you and your team are committed. This way you’ll encourage your colleagues to value-based decision making, too. When the decision making in your organization is guided by strong shared values, it makes leadership more predictable and scalable.
- Give more freedom and responsibility than you’d normally dare and let people surprise you positively.
Letting go some of your power may feel uncomfortable, even painful, at first, but it’s inevitable. There’s only so much one person can or, even should, do.
Read more about enjoying being led and three other simple steps to scalable leadership in our ebook.
