Cameron Herold says most managers talk too much and praise too little. He pushes a 2-to-1 listening-to-talking ratio, knowing which projects your team struggles with so you can coach them, and delegating 80% of your work so you lead through others instead of doing it yourself.
Chapters
You may not agree with this as a COO or a CEO, but if you don't agree with it, you're wrong. Let me explain what the 3 big things are that you need to be doing as a leader every single day. And it's probably not what you're doing today. The first thing you need to do is to praise people a lot more often than you do today. It's kind of like our ears and our mouth. God gave us 2 ears and 1 mouth. We need to use them in that ratio. We need to listen twice as often as we talk. Well, we need to praise our people a lot more than we're currently doing inside of our business. If you're constantly telling your employees, fix this, this is broken, add this, set another goal, do this. But you're forgetting to praise them and say thank you and to show them all of the stuff they're doing well, to show them when they're living the core values, then you're really missing the point. Number 2 is to be aware which projects your direct reports are struggling with so that you can actually show up to coach them, to problem solve, to praise them, to mentor them. It's a core skill that you need to be really good at. But if you're so busy managing emails and doing your projects and just being on phone calls, and you forget that your core job is to grow people and grow their confidence and grow their skills and grow their connections, you're really, really missing the point. The third thing you need to do is delegate a lot more than you're doing today. Your to-do list does not have your name on the top of it, right? My to-do list doesn't say Cameron's to-do list because my job is to delegate 80% of what's on my to-do list. My job is not to do work. My job is to get results through others.
