What’s every team leader, boss, or manager’s dream?
To have competent employees or team members who can make good decisions, handle things on their own, and only ask for your help on the really big problems.
I’m here to tell you that it’s not a pipe dream. You really can have employees like that.
The pipe dream part would be to think that you can magically have that without effort. You can’t.
So where do you start?
With one simple question.
“What would you do?”
When someone under your oversight come to you with a problem or needs help figuring out what to do, you can help them learn what to do by first asking them, “What would you do?”
And then listen.
If their idea wouldn’t cause any harm or create unnecessary risk, even if it’s not what you would do or how you would fix the problem, I submit that you should let them implement their idea.
Now, there are some objections to handling things this way, but there are also a lot of benefits.
We’ll talk about those next week.
– Zac Smith, VC
