Invest time now, or lose time later

In recent posts I’ve been talking about the value of setting direction and the rules of the game for your organisation.

If all this sounds like a lot of work, consider the alternative.

If you don’t spend time articulating your goal, your edges, and your rules (and there are plenty of different frameworks for doing this), what happens? The answer is that you all too easily find yourself tied up again and again in the kind of granular, front-line decision making that you should be delegating — that, in fact, you told people that you had delegated to them.

Nobody enjoys micro-management: you don’t enjoy spending time doing other people’s jobs, and they don’t enjoy you interfering. Even if you avoid that pitfall, if you haven’t told people up front where to aim for, you’ll need to do plenty of course correction as you go, and you risk having to give a lot of negative feedback with very little positive. Constant criticism wears down even the strongest relationship.

Telling people where to head sets them up for success, and gives them a chance to impress you using their own initiative. That sets up the chance for much more positive feedback - and it means you get more of the outcomes that you need, without having to intervene so directly.

I give the final words in this article to a quote from Michael and Freddy Ballé’s “Lead With Respect”:

In any case, people have a right to succeed and — ”

“Surely you mean a duty to succeed?”

“Nope,” he smiled, shaking his head. “That’s the point. It’s a right. People come to work to succeed. It’s our responsibility as managers to support them so that they do. Every person has the right to succeed every time they do their job, and they also have the right to have a successful career.”