Are You Busy Managing Your Employees?

When you hire employees, the whole idea is to get more done with less of your personal effort - right? Whether it's turning wrenches, selling your product/service, or dealing with suppliers, that work should get done with little if any direct effort from you.

You want your time free to do executive work - considering and planning new business directions, new markets, and other strategies to keep your company healthy and growing.

An important principle in leadership is that someone else should be doing everything and anything that someone else can do.

Here's David Finkel, CEO of Maui Mastermind, with three good tips on how to help employees manage themselves. Save your time and energy for the important work that only you can do. 

In addition to freeing your time for the things you need to be doing, this helps your people develop into leaders themselves - something every business leader should strive for. When your people develop into leaders, they can lead themselves to handle their business competently. When the time comes for them to hire people to support them, they're ready to lead a department.

When you're directly assigning work to be done, make it clear exactly what you want done, by when, and of course keep notes to remind yourself what you've assigned. Then let the person responsible for the task manage his or her own time, communication, and other resources to get it done. Trust me - they'll get better at it. And trust them - that's how they get better!

That's the general idea - David fleshes it out here.

John Stevens

November 2018