16 July 2021

Many of us feel we have a team that just don't do what we want them to do if left on their own. They're only really productive when we're on top of them constantly telling them what to do. This is called micro-managing people. If you're having to micro-manage your team, if you're having to tell them what to do and keep on top of them all the time then you are going to be using up a lot of your time. What you really want to be able to do is have a team that's independent and productive. So that you know you can give them a task, and they will go away and do it.

The two tactics that we will use to get this to happen is to redirect problems and to create problem solvers.

Redirecting problems involves getting other people that you have hired to deal with certain problems to actually deal with these problems. For example, Mary comes to you and asks a question about her pay, you can either spend 10 minutes looking into it for her then telling her what has happened, or you can train Mary to go directly to Barry who is responsible for payroll. This approach not only saves you time with this issue but is also training Mary not to be reliant on you.

Problem solvers are people that will solve the problem themselves. Most of us unconsciously train our team to bring problems to us, when they do, we solve the problem and reinforce this behavior. We need to retrain our team to solve their own problems.

Many of us have team members that come and see us every time they encounter a problem. This interrupts what we are working on and takes our time to respond. What we want is a team that operates independently within some broad guidelines. They only bring problems to us that are outside the guidelines, the problems we want to be involved in resolving – the rest they solve themselves.