Insights
by Meredith Jones
“If you want it done right, do it yourself.”
A lot of leaders take this approach—it’s what got them to the top spot in the first place! Leaders are used to being in charge of the process and the outcomes. That’s “the job.” But when you’re managing a team, this “do it myself” mindset can get you into trouble.
Below are some problems I see when managers give in to the instinct to solve every problem. After you read, I hope you’ll be convinced the best thing a good leader can do for their company, their team, and their personal career, is work themselves out of their job.
When a leader becomes the answer to every question, you train your team not to think independently. Over time they stop trying to solve issues before they come to you, because they've learned you'll just handle it. Now you have a team that can't operate without you AND a personal task list that keeps growing because everyone's problems are landing on your plate.
If you have five direct reports and each one brings you three problems a week they could solve without you, that's fifteen decisions sitting on your plate that don't belong there. Over a month, that's sixty. Over a year, that's more than 700 moments where someone else's thinking became your task.
Let’s assume you make an annual salary of $125,000 and each absorbed “moment” takes about an hour to complete. When you finish your own work (2,080 hours) AND absorb additional responsibilities your direct reports should have addressed (700 hours), you’ve successfully lowered your monetized value from approximately $60/hr to $45/hr. You’re doing more for less simply because you “had to handle it.” This simple math doesn’t include the emotional, perhaps physical, and certainly personal cost of this controlling, and sometimes, selfish approach.
Now, let’s look at my core philosophy, learned over 20+ years of experience managing people: “My Career is My Responsibility.” The MCMR mindset makes such a difference, I even wrote a book about it, and one of the things I talk about is workplace coaching.
As a manager, you are also a coach. Your job is to bring out the best in your team by empowering them to own their role (process and outcomes). The primary way to develop their critical thinking skills is to teach them to dig beyond the superficial answer, to ask more questions, to make them think.
The good news is those opportunities are probably built into your week already:
The goal of a coach is to give guidance and provide opportunity for your team to think alongside you, not wait for you to hand answers to them. See Chapter 6 of My Career Is My Responsibility for more on coaching, including the pitfalls most managers don't see coming.
“Working yourself out of a job” can sound a lot like a threat. Will you make yourself replaceable? Will you make it easier for your company to get rid of you? It’s true teams who operate without constant direction make a more resilient organization. But another truth…leaders who build the best teams make themselves indispensable by creating organic internal succession candidates and positioning themselves for future responsibility.
Think of it this way:
An independent team that runs well day-to-day is one of the most visible things a leader can point to in their list of accomplishments. You become the person who built an independent team, and that is a much harder thing to find than someone who can answer questions fast.
If you take advantage of coaching your people to be proactive problem-solvers and independent thinkers, you’ll reap the benefits at every level:
Encourage team members to be solutions focused when problems arise. Their recommendation(s) can be wrong, but if the employee is putting in effort to problem-solve, they are building an important skill/habit. With your guidance, you can train thinking before escalating, and over time this type of coaching produces more confident, empowered people who have the confidence to work problems out on their own. Then, you are on to the next!
Sera Business Advisors is a management consulting firm specializing in business-first HR, founded in 2014 by CEO Meredith Jones. Sera fosters growth and strategic development through training programs, an extensive library of proprietary tools, and a deep understanding of business for emerging startups, middle market companies, and publicly traded companies. To learn more, seraadvisors.com or pick up Meredith's book, My Career is My Responsibility.