| Hi Steve, As a leader, sometimes it's very tempting to give your team the answer, because everybody comes to you for guidance for feedback for suggestions for answers, and sometimes you know it. And sometimes you don't know it, but you feel like you still need to give your team some kind of a response. But the real secret is to not give your team the answers even if you know it. Of course, if you don't know it, you shouldn't make it up. You should just admit you don't know. And you don't know what the answer is. But that's a topic for another video. But the point is that if you keep giving your team the answers, if you keep finding the solutions for your team, you are going to become the decision making bottleneck for your team or for your organization. And I know this is a really hard thing for people to embrace. I try to do this with my team as well. They come to me with something and they say, Hey, what do you think we should do? And I know what we should do. And it's very tempting to say, oh, you should go do this. But instead, I say, What do you think we should do? What is your idea? And really, what this does is a couple of things. Number one, it gives more accountability, more autonomy. And I think it creates a lot more engagement for your team. It allows them to come up with the solutions to their own problems instead of relying on you to solve their problems for them. Another thing that this does for you as a leader is it frees up your time, you as a leader should not be spending all of your energy and time focusing on making decisions that other people can make. Instead, you should be focusing on the strategic direction of the business or the team, the mission, the vision, engaging, motivating, inspiring people doing leadership stuff. But if you're just constantly stuck, and everybody has to come to you for approvals, and what do you think about this, and should we do that, all of a sudden, you are your value as a leader, your impact as a leader gets diminished considerably. So the whole point of this video is to say that you should not be giving the answers to your team even if you know them. Instead, ask questions that will allow those around you to come to the answers on their own. Click HERE to watch the video. |
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