Are You Delegating or Micro-Managing?

We built our businesses on force of personality, right? We're charming, we're good salespeople, we know what we're doing, we're pretty good operators, you know, we deliver on what we're gonna do, and we solve every problem and we're in every meeting, make every decision, right? And that's fine for a certain level, that solopreneur, you know, a couple employees maybe, but it caps out pretty quick. For sure. Because as soon as you start getting any kind of scale, and this is exactly my story, as soon as I started to get scale, I had no idea to build structure. And, and it became too stressful and too difficult. And worse, I believed that I had to be in every meeting and make every decision and I had to run every client. And it plateaus. And that plateau could be profitable but highly stressful. And to reduce the stress, you're going to reduce the, the, the level of income. That's the only compromise, right? And so you have no choice, you bring on people, and learning to let go was excruciating. And the more I couldn't let go, the more I pissed off really smart, talented people. And to take the risk, you know, and I did it in small steps, you know, to let somebody do it. And if they did it the first or second time and it wasn't the way I wanted to do it, to be okay with that. Yeah. There's a great story that David Marquet, who used to be a submarine captain, talks about how he had one guy on his team, this junior guy who was so good at parking the submarine when they came into port. So what did they do? Every time they came into port, they gave it to, you know, Kenny to park the submarine because he was so good. And they didn't give it to anybody else because Kenny was the best submarine parker. And it occurred to him, what happens if Kenny's sick? And so they gave it to somebody else to do, and he was terrible. And so the temptation was to give it back to Kenny, but he didn't. They let the guy who wasn't good practice and practice and practice and practice and practice until he got good. Then they took him off and they put somebody else on who was terrible, and they let him practice and practice and practice and practice. Then you got 3 great guys who were fantastic at parking the submarine. Now you've got a bench. And more importantly, you've empowered people and you've shown that you trust in them. What it took was the patience, and this is what I had to learn, to coach somebody, not to step in and play the game. No coach is on the field. And to learn to offer my point of view, but not tell them how I would do it, and encourage them to try again, rather than saying, why can't you get anything right? Or to catch them doing something right. One of my favorite young leaders, his name's Cami Yoder. She's in the Army. And her troops, she wasn't even in command that day, her troops had to just qualify for shooting. Pretty basic if you're in the Army, right? And one soldier couldn't do it. And I can't remember the exact number. It's, they have to hit 20 out of 30, you know, targets or whatever it is. And he was hitting like 7. I mean, it was bad. And the sergeant was standing right next to him, basically yelling at him. to hit the target, you know, yelling at him to aim better. And it's getting worse. Cammie sort of moves in, pushes the guy aside. She says, let me take over. And she stands next to the guy and very calmly says, you know how to shoot your gun. Just do what you've been taught and shoot. And he aims and misses. She says nothing. She literally just says nothing. He aims, he shoots, he hits the target. She celebrates like it's his birthday. He aims again, he misses. She says nothing. He aims, he shoots, he hits. She celebrates like it's his birthday. He hits a 28 out of 30. Wow. Right? He's a great shooter because he knows what to do. The problem was, the stress. Yeah. She trusted in him. She made him believe in himself. And most importantly, she didn't try and do it the way she would do it. The temptation was to let go and be patient.