Dan Sullivan: Get The Team You’ve Always Wanted With These Three Steps (Part I)

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What if your primary responsibility in your business were just to make things up? Then, you’d have a team whose responsibility is to take hold of your vision and make it real. And, if it’s intended to be a regular thing, they make it recur.

That’s how you exponentially multiply your productivity and profitability: by focusing on what you do best and letting other people use their talents to achieve the rest. It also frees up vast amounts of time so you can be with your family and friends, pursue hobbies, and make a contribution to causes that matter to you.

When you build this kind of Self-Managing Company, your team goes from feeling like a burden to being a total support system that extends and rounds out your capabilities.

If that’s not how your business works right now, you’re not alone. A lot of entrepreneurs are extraordinarily gifted at doing a wide range of things themselves, yet utterly frustrated when it comes to getting others to do things the way they want. Is it their fault, or do they have the wrong people on their team? If they could only work this out, they feel, the business would be so much better off — and so would they!

Is your delegation going in the right direction?
If you’re feeling this frustration, it’s possible you may already have a very effective delegation system at work in your business — it just goes in the wrong direction. The first telltale sign of this is that your team members get a lot more time off than you do: They take weekends, vacations, and holidays, and the work just boomerangs back to you. After all, you’re the one who’s always at the office or just a phone call away.

You might argue that you need to set an example. Or that since you make more money, you have to shoulder more of the load. And with your understanding of the business and your high standards, it’s easy to keep resorting to, “Oh, just give it here.”

And thus begins “reverse delegation.”

Doing everything yourself may have been necessary when you were starting out. When you want to grow your business, however, that behaviour will hold you back.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, and begins — like most breakthroughs — with a shift in your thinking. Here are three strategies that break the cycle of reverse delegation and get your team on the road to self-management. Best of all, you can do them with the team you have, and you never have to become a better manager!

Check back next week for the three steps to getting the team you’ve always wanted…