Bill Gallagher explains how to build leaders instead of just managing them. He shares how he trained his team to make decisions so he could take a month off to Italy in 2009, using weekly meetings and scorecards to empower them. The goal: a business that runs without you.
Oh, are you hanging on too long or are you passing the baton? The subject of our conversation today is really about fully empowering leaders, about giving it fully away, letting them run with it, being a leader who develops leaders, ultimately a leader who develops leaders. Who develops leaders. Right? Or are you hanging on too much, micromanaging things, being criticized in that way? Oh, I got a personal story on this one that's really good. But before I do that, let me just point out that recently Prince Charles became King Charles III. He waited until the age of 73 for the job. His mom hung onto the job for over 70 years, dying on the job at the age of 96. She did a good job with her job, but was she really developing that next thing and empowering leaders? I don't think most of our leaders in waiting are going to wait around until we turn 96 and pass away. If you want a strong and thriving growing company, right, you need to empower leaders and fully pass that baton and hand over something. Now listen, I first learned of the Rockefeller habits and the scaling up and a lot of other leadership things years earlier, many of them long before. And I, and I knew a lot of things and I was doing many of them right. I was doing annual planning and a mid year check and I had weekly meetings and a daily huddle and I had scorecards and scoreboards and all kinds of things like that. I was doing a lot of those things well. And yet I still couldn't get time away from the business of any magnitude. I was still answering emails, I was handling upsets, I was monitoring things because I hadn't fully passed the baton. I hadn't really given it away. So in 2009, my wife and I looked at each other and we realized that although the economy was in shambles, at that point our business was in real trouble. This was also the time that we'd promised ourselves our kids were going to hit a certain age and we were going to take some real time off. So now we've got the business in trouble. I can't get away from the business ever. And we're supposed to take this time off. So what did I do? Well, we figured out no matter what, we were going to take the time off because the family and the kids were more important than really anything else. Like we would backpack if we needed to, if we didn't have a business or a house. So that first commitment was made. The second thing I had to do then is shift the way I worked with the company because we were trying to create a turnaround for the business at that point. So coming out of that recession. So what I did is I just asked myself and my team regularly, what would you do? So I put reminders around my office, don't solve their problems. Ask another question, Things like that, little reminders to myself. And for a whole year, I worked on asking people, what are you going to do when I'm gone? How would you handle this if I wasn't here? What ideas do you have? Instead of automatically reflexively solving every problem that came my way automatically, I just started empowering them to solve their own problems, supporting them, encouraging me. I spent nearly a year, it was nine or 10 months passing the baton until it came time for us to go. Then we took the kids, we went to Italy. We were gone for a month. Now, it wasn't a whole year, it wasn't even a whole summer, But a month was a profound breakthrough. And not only that, it was a month where I wasn't on the phone and on email Every single day in every place. We really could rely on the team. In a time of real growth, the team went to work on things. They knew how to do their job. They had the structures already. They just didn't have me micromanaging them, breathing down their neck. I had fully empowered them and they were able to run with it at that point. I hope you can too, and use that to your benefit. My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this scaling up business podcast. Our show comes here every week and we'll be back next week with the next show on everything to do with scaling up and this leadership series around the kind of leadership that scales to help you go so like it. Subscribe, turn on your notifications, pass them along to a friend, share it with somebody else who could use it and but most of all, keep coming back. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up.
