So you’re too busy eh? Let me rephrase that. So you’re too productive eh? You’ve hit the limit of what you can achieve and you need some help. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
You think carefully about what you can afford and balance that with what you need. You go and find the right person or people and in time, you have it. Your team. You can be confident of their abilities, you chose them. So why do you insist on checking everything they do? Every. Little. Thing. Let’s think about some of the feelings that behaviour produces inside the head of your colleague, sorry I mean victim:
- Lack of trust
- Undermined
- Disengaged
- What’s the point?
One of the simplest things great managers do is to get the right people around them and then critically, get out of the way and let them get on with it. Show your colleagues you trust them, support them, and engage them. Give them a purpose – show them what the point is. Get out of the way, please.
As long as your team is consistent in delivering good results there is indeed no reason to checking on them. Empowering and involving your team is indeed great contributor to great performance. Nevertheless there are teams which need your presence in order to grow and become self-managed. You need to establish knowledge sharing culture where colleagues will gladly look after each other, but even than part of your role continues to be of controlling nature. If you don’t, you will quickly find out that you were wrong once your team makes terrible mistake and you will be one to blame.
People do need regular flow of feedback (positive and negative) and it is role of manager to provide that. Leaving your team on their own could also make them feel that you don’t care, not only that you trust them. True is some people need it more than others.
After that is why you are their manager. To manage them.
Great post Doug pointing out some common problems and trust issues where people use less than half of their potential simply by not getting enough empowered by their superiors.
I say keep in touch with your people, and teach them to share their knowledge and information. Praising them for being proactive and using their initiative will eventually lead to more autonomous workforce. Yes get out of the way to make them feel trusted but also be close enough to not only show that you care, but also to learn about how your people think.
Peter – I appreciate your sense of balance. You add a huge amount of value to my somewhat one sided rant based outbursts! Quite a team eh 🙂 I really wish I’d written your last paragraph – it’s excellent thanks
Doug
Team indeed Doug. The one I can be nothing else than proud of. Thanks for sharing.
I worked for a great leader for many years. He was (still is!) a great people enabler & developer – his mantra was “trust but verify”. This doesn’t mean check up or spy on your people! It means trust your people (immensely) and talk to everyone involved to understand (verify) the activities of your people and their impact. Then relay what you are hearing/seeing to appreciate or amend actions & behaviours.
So to Peters excellent point, for me, the role of leader/manager is to “trust but verify” with the most positive of intentions!
Hello David thanks for your observations about leadership and the personal example always helps to reinforce things. I thought it useful to provide a link to an excellent post by Rob Jones on leadership – there are other good examples to be found here:
http://mastersorbust.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/the-one-where-i-first-talk-about-leadership/
Cheers – Doug