3 Ways To Make Your Team Less Reliant On You

If your team relies on you for every decision and approval, their progress is limited by your availability. I’m Dan Crompton, and today, I’m sharing three steps to empower your team and ensure seamless operations even when you’re not around. Great leadership is about setting the tone so your team can thrive independently.

Transcription:

If your team is reliant on you for decisions and approval and help, then their progress is going to be limited by your 40 hours a week because stuff just can’t get fixed or resolved or done without your say so.

Here are three steps you can take instead. Because leadership, great leadership, is having a presence even when you’re not in the room. And what that means is that you’ve set the guidance, you’ve set the tone so that the team is able to get on with stuff.

They’re able to fix mistakes without you being there. That’s a sign of great leadership. That’s a sign that you’ve set something up that exists outside of yourself and outside of your head and outside of your 40 hours a week.

The first thing to put in place is to make sure that you’ve got a really clear culture and values set. Those aren’t just kind of wishy-washy statements up on the wall. They’re there to actually help people make decisions.

They’re there to guide people’s attitudes and behaviours and how we behave around here. So, they are really important as long as you make them practical and realistic and meaningful for people’s everyday work.

The second strategy is to make sure that you’ve got systems, usable systems in the business for all of the repeated tasks, whether that’s templates or checklists or how to guides, because that’s the only way you can get that consistency in how the operations of your business or team work.

The third strategy is to agree expectations. So, to have a set of standards, have a code of conduct, whatever you want to call it. These are the rules of how we do our work. These are the standards that our work has to meet.

This is what we do when mistakes happen. This is what we do when things go wrong. Setting those expectations and standards and getting the team to agree to them give you the confidence not to be the only person who is the team, not to be the only person who can make decisions, not to be the bottleneck for all the work that’s going out.

So, if you find that your team is reliant on you, they need you, and that you’re a bottleneck for decisions and action, keep that phrase in mind that great leadership is having a presence even when you’re not in the room.

So right now, what happens when you leave the room? Is it a case of when the cats away the mice will play? Or are your standards and processes and expectations set so clearly that the team know exactly what to do even when you’re not there?

Key Takeaways:

• Establish clear culture and values: Develop practical, meaningful guidelines that help your team make decisions and shape their behaviours.
• Implement robust systems: Use templates, checklists, and how-to guides to ensure consistency in repeated tasks and operations.
• Set and agree on expectations: Define standards and a code of conduct that guide how work should be done and how mistakes should be handled.

By following these strategies, you’ll foster an environment where your team can confidently operate without your constant input.

This is the hallmark of great leadership. What happens when you leave the room? Are your standards and processes clear enough for your team to continue seamlessly?