What's the real reason that your team keeps coming to you for every little thing? We're gonna dive into that today on strategy, solutions, and sanity, and give you a few solutions here to help you get out of the weeds and not be in every little decision of your business every single day.
📍 So welcome to Strategy Solutions and Sanity. This is a show for second time entrepreneurs who like being creative and like winging it, but know you need a little bit more structure to scale quicker. Those family run businesses who are tired of chaos running the show and just those small teams that know like, Hey, we need some strategy.
We can't just beat throwing and spaghetti at the walls every day, but where do we even start? If you're ready to lead in your business with confidence, build something that lasts and not lose your mind in the process, then I'm here for you. I'm Sam, your host and your business and team strategist, certified Chaos Wrangler, problem solver. Whatever you wanna call me. I help make the messy parts of business feel simple and manageable from hiring people who actually get things done not just your cousin-in-law, to building systems that won't implode. The second you take a vacation. We're gonna figure it all out together. So let's bring the strategies, so the solutions, and most importantly, the sanity to your day.
All right, so today we're diving into if you are feeling like you are in every decision, your team comes to you for everything. You're not feeling like they have ownership or like they can get things done without you. Also, the tendency we have in this situation is to fall into the mindset of if you want something done well, you gotta do it yourself.
That's not true. It's just how you're going about things. And so we need to look at what's happening and adjust, right? Have a little bit more empowerment with our team. Now, like with everything, there's always the disclaimer that there's a million damn reasons this could be happening. You could have a lot of different factors going on in your business.
I'm gonna cover the most common reasons and some of the practical ways you can go about this. But of course, everyone has their own unique situation. So, take from this, what you can. Okay. A few different reasons why your team might be coming to you for everything. The first one is that you have created an environment that is a little scary for people to make mistakes.
So if that feels a little bit harsh, I'm sorry, I'm here to cut through the BS and not fluff you up. So if you have always critiqued, like everything your team does, if you have had maybe harsher consequences to when mistakes have happened, like. Not that you have like an anger or, or an anger problem or like a temper or something.
But if maybe you've called people out in team meetings for some of the mistakes that they've made, so you've publicly have embarrassed them or publicly just kind of let them know like, Hey, you fucked up here or you have just always had a critique on everything that they have done.
So, for instance, I know someone who works in government affairs at this large corporate company. He produces high quality work, however, his boss has always had revisions on, like every press release he's drafted, every speech he's written for executives to give at an event. Every graphic that he's created for, event banners or anything like that, his boss has pretty much always had a revision. And it wasn't until like the past year, so like three years in that his boss kind of eased up on some of those revisions. But it got to the point where he felt like, why am I even creating anything in the first place?
Like my boss is just gonna blow it all up. Because it wasn't just like small critiques here and there, it was just a complete revision, completely redoing everything that he had created. So. And that is not an environment where the work is appreciated. And it's also not an environment where there's clarity around what mistake was made.
It was just like, I didn't like this. We're gonna redo it. Instead of giving feedback of, Hey, here's why I would do things differently, here's what I think your original post kind of conveys and this is what I'd like to see in the future. That kind of healthy feedback wasn't there, it was just, let's blow it all up.
So we wanna look at how involved are you in certain day-to-day things, and how involved do you actually need to be? You have maybe trained your team to always come to you because you always have some kind of critique, some kind of opinion where things have to be redone in the first place. So that could be happening in your team where they feel like you are going to critique everything anyway, so they might as well just come to you with the problem instead of trying to come to you with a solution first.
Now, if they really are missing the mark, they're not meeting expectations. You do need to correct things. It's not just like you have a particular way of how you want certain things to look or feel, or how the process needs to go.
It's not just you being particular, but it really is your team just producing poor quality work. Then we wanna look at the clarity you're providing around expectations. They might be coming to you with everything because they're confused.
And they might not even realize, like they're confused on stuff. They just kind of don't know. What's the next thing that needs to happen? And part of that could be because you haven't provided enough clarity around expectations for something. For instance, I worked with a client who hired his first high level manager, so not a department manager or anything.
This is the first kind of VP director, chief level role that he had hired for his company. And one of the realizations that we had to have was, Hey, you don't know what your expectations are until they aren't met. That's actually a super common thing that a lot of my clients, have to go through.
The problem there though, is that then we've hired someone at the senior level who should be able to take his vision, take things from like the vision level. Turn them into strategy, turn them into execution for the teams below him or the teams below them. And that just wasn't happening. So this senior level person ended up coming to him for all of these decisions that he was really trying to delegate to the senior level person because there wasn't enough clarity on like what actually needed to happen and what the outcomes were.
When you are delegating tasks , whether they're a manager or frontline employee or something, do they have clarity on not only what they're supposed to be doing, but then also the expectations of the outcomes of that work?
When you're bringing someone onto your team or you already have these people on your team, you're just not seeing the ownership that you want. What I would suggest you do is really look at the roles and responsibilities that you have laid out for your team. Who is responsible for what, and then have you communicated your expected outcomes for those.
So if you do this thing, I expect it to look like this. For example, let's go back to the senior manager. The expectation is that they're able to resolve team problems and keep a happy culture without having to involve the owner on everything. Or. There's expectations around, Hey, we're able to roll out new policies without a big hit on our Google Star ratings because we're able to do it in a way that keeps customers happy, right?
So expectation around customer satisfaction. The task is rolling out new policies, expectations around team satisfaction, positive culture, things like that. The task is managing the team. Figuring out team problems, right? So look at the tasks and then look at, well, what are you actually wanting them to achieve with those tasks?
And have you communicated that outcome?
Let's say you've hired a business development manager, are they aware of all the different things that they're supposed to be doing,
how often they're supposed to be having direct outreach with your ideal customers versus networking and building referral partnerships, are they aware of maybe all the notes they're supposed to be tracking in your CRM, the different things that you want to be tracking outside of just deals closed?
Are they aware of the type of brand voice that you want them to have? Like, yep. Everyone has their own way of selling. Everyone has their own personality that helps them close. That's cool. But there's also a certain experience that you want your prospects to feel that then carries over into customer, deliver a customer experience service or product delivery or something. So is your business development person aware of how you would do things?
If you haven't communicated how you would do things and how you really want things to get done, then your team is never going to meet those expectations and you're always gonna feel like you have to be involved in it.
That's where we get that trap of, well, if you want something done right, then you better do it yourself. That's not true. It's really just how you're engaging with your team and how much clarity you're giving them to get those things done so that you don't have to do them.
you've gotta look at what are the areas that you're over involved in and is it because you've been too critical or is it because you haven't clarified expectations enough? And how can you start to remove yourself without making your team feel like you're abandoning them? So you're removing yourself by coaching them to find the solutions on their own.
The simplest place to start here would be maybe it's a little bit of both things happening where maybe you are a little bit like overly critical with certain things. Maybe you aren't giving enough clarity with your team. The simplest place is always to just pick one place to start. Maybe pick one team member, one department, or one type of question that you get every week, and just start changing how you are reacting to it, and you can start coaching your team.
So if they come to you with a question, you can ask, well, what would you do? How would you solve this? Do you think that this social media graphic conveys this type of brand image? Do you think that saying this in a sales meeting makes the prospect feel like this or like that? Right? So just start asking them open-ended questions.
Don't make them feel like you're. Setting them up for like a trick question or something, right? We wanna be coaching them in a genuine, I care about you succeeding. I also care about not having to be involved in this anymore kind of way. Right? And that involves empathetic coaching. But just pick one thing, either one person, one department, one question you always get, just start introducing a little bit more open-ended questions and coaching in and then you'll start to see a little bit of a transformation in your team.
And then you can kind of. Expand on that to another person or another department or another type of project. Okay. alright. That is our quick and dirty strategy, solutions and sanity. We like to do quick episodes on this show so that we can cut through the BS and you can get the solution and answer that you need. So all you need to remember today is that you don't need to carry every decision in the business forever. We can not only delegate tasks, but also delegate some decision making in your team.
It's all about teaching your team to own those problems in a way that frees you up to lead and not babysit.
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