Letting Go of Control

One of every CEO's most difficult tasks is "letting go of control."

Now there are a couple of things here to keep in mind. First, ask yourself, are you a perfectionist? Or are you someone who tends to chill back and need someone to motivate you? If you are a perfectionist, that means you tend to micromanage people.

Probably not all the time, but it probably means that you are not quite a hundred percent self-aware of all the times that you actually are rubbing people the wrong way. As a result, you might micromanage a project with a vendor or a team member, and they might not say anything because, "Oh, that's just Kevin," right?

That was one of the hardest skills for me to sharpen. Yes, I'm self-aware but what happens is when you start working on really, really difficult projects, sometimes you can't just let go and hope it goes well because there's a lot on the line. So what I like to do is actually categorize things for my team. That way I don't need to have an internal freak-out and micromanage things.

If it's a tier-one task, meaning it's the most important task, it cannot be done wrong. Guess what? I'm going to have input as we go. However, for tier 2 and 3 tasks, I will not be doing those things and if it gets done wrong then I will point it out later. You may be asking yourself, why not just watch everything as it goes down?

Here's the reason: Your team isn't going to be able to be great until you learn how to be great by letting them solve their own problems.

One of the things that great leaders do is they do not micromanage. They let their team members execute and they also let their team members grow, fail, and do better. So if you're somebody who tends to micromanage, it's probably because you got that perfectionism thing going on and you think that, "Oh, I know it best."

It also could be a case if you hired the wrong team. Because if you hire the right team, you aren't going to be having those issues as often because you will not be the smartest person on your team.

If you're a six or seven-figure entrepreneur what tends to happen is as you scale your business, especially on the way to seven, you will realize that the same team that got you from five to six is not usually going to be the team that takes you from six to seven.

So take a moment. Evaluate, "do I tend to give my input or constructive criticism before the projects are done?" If so, maybe you should categorize those tasks using a tier one, two, or three ranking system.

Now, if you're someone who lacks motivation, that's a different story. If you're having a difficult time letting go of control, but you also lack motivation, you need to really ask yourself what's the issue. Nine times out of 10, what I see with my clients is actually an issue of urgency. They're running a business but making money is not as urgent to them. If that's the case, you need to understand that anybody you hire is not going to perform with urgency either.

If you take your financial and emotional health bank account seriously, other people are going to do the same. And sometimes urgency comes in our life from a crisis, like it did in mine. Sometimes it becomes, our new operating frequency.

So ask yourself, why am I having a hard time letting go of control? How am I going to let go of more control in my business today?

Feel free to schedule a consult with me directly if you need to talk it through.

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