Hey friends – Adam Thompson coming to you always from FocalPoint of Minnesota’s world headquarters in lovely Plymouth, Minnesota. Hope you having a great day.
What’s your leadership style and how do you manage your team?
- Do you set expectations and get out of the way or do you solve all the problems?
- Are you deeply involved?
- Are you fixing everything and micromanaging?
If you’re in that latter category, what does it mean for your employees, how is it affecting your business, and how is it affecting you?
In today’s video, we’re going to look at the advantages of empowering your team to solve their own problems: how it can lead to a more effective and happy workforce, how that team can lead to better results in your business, and how it can translate to more time and more opportunity for you as the business owner.
The Drawbacks of Being a Top-Down Leader
I work with a contractor client in Nebraska who is successful: they had two locations and the ownership was doing well in spite of the management style. The owner was very much a top-down leader: his attitude was, “I will tell you what to do, you will execute. I will solve the problem, you will execute the problem, and we will be successful.”
It worked to a point. What he lacked was a team that had responsibility.
There was not ownership within his employee ranks because the attitude was “no matter what we do, the boss will swoop in and save the day,” and it led to him being deeply involved in all aspects of the business. It led to him sucking the time and the life out of himself into the business, and not being able to focus on the things that matter.
Creating a Plan for Team Skill Development
So we sat down and worked out a plan on how to address and how to empower his team and build them into leaders that could solve their own problems.
- The first step was to set clear expectations: for the business, for the business units, for the teams, and for the individual employees: they knew what they had to do to be successful and how they would be measured.
- Step two was to give them latitude: the owner had to learn to allow some rope, let the leash out a little bit, and give his people a chance to try and fail and learn – and try again – in order to succeed.
- The third step was his role as the coach, as the evaluator – as the one who would sit down with his employees, his managers, and his leadership team and talk through the results and get their feedback: how is this working, what didn’t work, how might you do it better? And then empower them to go out and try that next thing.
And the results are fantastic: he went from someone who is constantly running back and forth between two satellite offices, to someone who stayed at home. He had less windshield time because he had two offices that worked independently and got things done: because he had people employed and in the right chairs who knew what they had to do and felt empowered to figure it out.
He built leaders in this organization which allowed him to take a step back to sit in the ownership chair, to sit in the visionary chair, to move things forward and, ultimately, it gave him his time back – it gave him his life back and he had the chance to actually enjoy his own success.
How Can You Transform Your Management to Grow Your Business?
So what’s it look like for you? What’s your management style?
Are you working toward an empowered leadership management style, are you building leaders, or are you simply fixing things? And if you’re in that fixer role, how is it affecting you?
Let’s talk about it.
Let’s get together, let’s have a cup of coffee, and let’s have a conversation. I will set up a link below where you can schedule time to talk about what your team looks like and whether or not you’re letting them get things done on their own and how we might build that plan.
Let’s develop leaders: let’s develop empowered employees to allow them to solve their own problems, which allows you to do what you want to do.
Let’s have a conversation about it, let’s build your team, let’s grow your business.
Have a great day, I look forward to hearing from you and I’ll talk to you soon.
