Why does it feel like you have to manage everything in your practice?

The five things you need to give your team so they can manage themselves.

I don’t know anyone who owns and/or manages a small business that doesn’t feel this way on a pretty regular basis. Of course you know it’s your name that’s signed on about a thousand dotted lines. It’s no mystery that you basically take full responsibility for anything and everything related to your business’s activities. Global responsibility is, well, massive. But that does not mean, however, that you have to feel the weight of the world on your shoulders.

While it may feel heroic to rush in and extinguish every figurative fire in your business, you may be setting yourself up for becoming a full time firefighter. Your team learns from your every move. Each time you solve a problem they could have solved either on their own or with their team, you teach them that they are not capable of self management. You might think “Okay, I got it. Don’t be a micromanaging martyr superjerk around the office and my employees will start solving shit for me.” And if you do think that, you are destined for even more heartache. Invariably, your team will fall short of your standard for how things should be done. They will become even less empowered as you eye roll-heavy sigh your way through “fixing” their mistakes. Let’s say you’re willing to consider an alternative channel for your energy that will change the way you manage responsibility in your practice. And above all else, you realize that a resilient organization needs more than one problem solver in its mix. You originally hired people to do a job, perform a task a role, or because you were just plain overwhelmed. Your intention was to have them help you serve your clients and organization more fully. And, although it may not always feel this way, they want to do that also! Your team wants autonomy. It’s in their nature. They are humans literally built to solve problems both alone and together. Not only do they solve challenges well together, they are super awesome at being imaginative and creative when they’re uninhibited. So what’s holding them back? Now that you’ve suspended being a control freak for seven minutes, consider these five things they need to rally around what makes your practice awesome and start helping you manage effectively:

1.What’s important in your practice.

Ok, dust off the old mission statement about quality and excellence. If it does indeed say that and that’s really your mission statement, great. (You can always tweak it over time). It always seems corny to talk about this vision-values-mission- philosophy stuff but it may be the most critical thing you ever articulate for your practice. Why? Because if you want your team to start taking care of things as well as you do, you need to give them something to care about. They deserve a filter for when they make decisions on your organization’s behalf. How should they treat patients? each other? What else is important as they go about their work? What is your organization fighting for more(or less) of in this world!? A great example is Google’s “Don’t be evil” mantra. If you do a good job articulating, modeling, and reinforcing what’s important in your practice, your team can use your values not just in their interactions with clients but also with each other. Make positive reinforcement a value and watch the high five’s commence. Make dependable teamwork a value and you can use it to have the tough talk with the team member who keeps showing up late and letting his team down. Most of all, it is just super proactive to let your team know what’s really important so that you can work on common ground.

2. A path to resourcefulness.

Now that your team has defined values to guide supporting those you work with and for, they need to have the resources necessary to be resourceful. Simply, if they don’t have a efficient access to what they need to solve problems, they can’t take action and help you. If stuff is all over everybody’s hard drives or in random paper file folders, nobody can get anything done. Contacts, forms, information, weblinks, and manuals should all be at your team’s fingertips. Notice a common frustrating item your team is always searching for? One solution is for you to go through all of the work of organizing them. An even better solution is to have your team member’s help with identifying helpful resources and allow them to upload them to an accessible place.

3. Systems to count on!

Now that resources are in a commonly accessible spot, your team has the ingredients they need to start building systems. If you really want to grow empowerment, a digital operations manual can become an incredible resource for “HOW” in your practice. As laborious as building and organizing systems can be, it will be tough for your team to get away from their “willy nilly” ways. If you think that systems sound cold and controlling, it is quite the opposite! Systems allow your team to habituate regular activities so you can focus even more of that human power on clients and imagining news ways to move your organization forward. This can get elaborate. But to get started some simple “who what when where and why” documents will suffice. The best systems tie their “why” to your values to make sure how you do things is consistent with what’s important in your practice. Even better systems are linked to the necessary resources, appropriate team members, and regular duties that will assure their effective implementation.

4. A chance to be leaders:

Meetings can be expensive, time wasting exercises in futility if they are not designed with a purpose. If your definition of meetings is just you preaching to your employees, you are going to have a hard time developing your team into self managing leaders. Build a system that requires your employees to step up and lead on a regular basis. Give them a great meeting system and structure they can execute. Challenge them to bring value specific content to the group to further reinforce your mission and what’s important. Most importantly move things forward. If your meeting concludes and everyone walks away with several shaky “We shoulds”, you might as well not have had the meeting in the first place. Tasks should be clearly identified and assigned in the meeting, with a deadline. If it is a more complex undertaking, start a project and make sure all tasks and expectations are registered with everyone who is going to be a part of the project. This not only allows team members to have concrete opportunities to manage themselves, but also grow the confidence to become leaders themselves.

5. The tools to work together effectively and grow your organization.

This sounds great, but what about the extroverts and introverts and Type A’s and Type B’s and the team members with innies and the others with outies? Won’t things just fall apart if your organization becomes a free for all and everyone is trying to lead in there own way?! Maybe, if you don’t give people a way to channel their energy when working in the group. As each team member has been given the chance to understand the role, systems, and duties they are each individually responsible for, they then deserve some structure for how to work cooperatively with their team. First teach them to solve problems as a team. When someone wants you to clean up a mess or wants to gossip about a team member, don’t go along with it. The most successful teams and companies solve problems together and they don’t stop there, they challenge their team to ask “why” until they get past the personal and find the gap in their systems and make adjustments. This is the unglamorous, yet vital path to your practice’s growth. This is how your practice gets better and everyone on your team can do this! More frustrations? Challenge your team members to get out their and learn and share ways others are dealing with the similar problems. Finally, share as much data as is necessary to help your team know if your team is “winning.” This helps everyone feel like they are working toward the same goal and also gives them feedback on whether their current efforts are working or not. If everyone has different versions of success, it’s hard to rally together and stay on purpose.

A shift like this doesn’t happen overnight. Team members can be taken off guard when they are invited to own their role on your team. And give them time to build new habits for working together. If you want to grow your organization in a way that’s consistent with what’s important to you, and you realize you can’t do it alone, this is the path forward.