A short, first-person video by Chad Silverstein about leadership trade-offs: knowing when to stay in control and when to let go so teams can grow. He emphasizes timing and risk assessment, uses his company Restart’s app launch as an example of both cautious control and later delegation, and urges leaders (especially control-oriented ones) to deliberately give up authority when appropriate.
Chapters
There's a time to be in control and there's a time to let go. You gotta sometimes choose to lose. And I think that's a healthy discipline for leaders, because you can't always be in control. And if you want to grow your system, if you want your team to grow, then you need to be able to give them the reins, and you need to let them sometimes fail. And even when you could have given them the answer, sometimes that's the best way. And it's really hard as a leader to do that. And timing has a lot to do with this. You know, when you can afford to be able to give up some control because something's not urgent, you know, that's when you really have to work really hard against your tendency just to get something done because you know you can and because you want to in order to benefit the whole system and the people that you're working with. The time to be able to kind of take back the reins and stay in control is when you know there's big risks on the line and you're going to have to pay for it if you were to give up control of that. And you don't want to live with having regrets. So I'll give you one example. In my company, Restart, we had built an app, and everybody was kind of pushing me to launch. They wanted me to launch, which is funny, because this day is about, when are you going to launch? And I wasn't comfortable launching until I felt like I could stamp my name on this software and feel really good that I'd want to use it. And I was pretty stubborn about it. And I'm glad I did, because once we launched, of course, anytime you launch new software, there's always going to be bugs and problems. And I'm glad that we didn't do it when I was being pressured. And I also gave up a lot of control in this company. And I gave people a lot of flexibility to kind of build things on their own and be able to kind of have fun playing and switching directions and strategies based on where they wanted to see things go. And a lot of times it was really uncomfortable for me to do that, but I knew that was the way to kind of grow the individuals that I was working with and then also be able to kind of take the company to the next level, because I obviously couldn't do it all by myself. So knowing when the timing of this is really important. As a leader, it's okay to be in control. It's okay to recognize if you're a control freak. You just have to know when to fight these battles and sometimes choose to lose and give over the power to other people that you can trust. And if you don't feel like you can do that, that's a different problem that you're going to have to attack. And if you don't have the people to do it, that's a whole other issue. But hopefully you're building trust with people on your team and you're giving them some of that control and power. And as much as you may feel and know that you're a control freak, people around you are too. And if they don't have any control, that doesn't help you. And so it's something to think about. And that nuance is going to be the timing. So think about what you're in control of that you can give up today and give it over and what have you been delaying and at least provide the clarity of when it is that you're going to launch. I think that's a fair, fair statement to do if you're a control freak.
