One of my clients made a very astute comment the other day. He said,
It should be self-evident that a company can have too many managers and not enough leaders.
But can you have too many leaders? In many respects I am trying to develop my team managers into team leaders because I don’t have the bandwidth to “lead” at their level. I need to be leading the whole company. Right now I think I have team “managers” not team leaders but I want them to become leaders.
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Remember that leadership is a role. Sometimes your managers are leaders and sometimes they manage. The better they manage, the more time you have for leading.
But what’s very important for you is that you trust that they do their job well, and if they don’t you should hold them accountable. You can phase this in by keeping track silently for the first period of time.
The idea is that by allowing them to manage themselves you free up time to do “leader things” and they learn to self-manage themselves. It’s basically letting go of your need to control in order to grow your company.
When mistakes are made, we look at the root cause and fix that rather than putting so much energy into a safety net that stops them from taking responsibility.
