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

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Last week I started to tell you how to get the team you’ve always wanted. This week, I lay it out in three steps.

1. Give your team the opportunity to fail — as long as they learn from their mistakes.
You’ve always taken risks, made mistakes, and learned from them. So if you want your team members to think and behave entrepreneurially, you have to give them a bit of that same learning space.

When they make a mistake, put the focus on learning from the experience: “What worked? What didn’t work? How can we make this go better next time?” This way, there’s no wasted emotion, no blame, and all their energy goes into their development rather that being wasted on self-defence.

2. Delegate your thinking along with the task.
What’s the point of doing this? What would success look like? When do you need this by? Share your vision, intentions, and judgement criteria along with the task, then let your team members use their own talents and methods to achieve your goal.

You and they will gain confidence in their abilities as you coach and acknowledge them from the sidelines, but they’ll only figure out the game by playing it themselves. They’ll learn and grow just like you did — and if they don’t, you can look at whether their abilities are better suited to another role, or another company.

3. Let them know how much communication you want about this delegation.
You’re a powerful force in your team members’ world, so it’s natural for them to feel intimidated about “bothering” you. You can completely alleviate their fear of getting blasted by making it clear when they should come to you.

For most projects you delegate, you’ll find there are three levels of communication to choose from:

“None. I trust you. Just tell me when it’s done.”
“I’m here if you need my help. Otherwise, just let me know it’s finished.”
“Check in with me at these stages of the process.”

If the stakes are high, the task particularly tough, or the team member new, you can escalate the delegation level and be more involved. Then, gradually, extract yourself as you and your team member gain confidence in their creativity and skill. But the trick remains the same: communicate, delegate, and enable. This allows your team to transform from a burden to be managed into a total support system that multiplies and rounds out your personal abilities.

The better you get at the delegation habit, the closer you get to having a Self-Managing Company. It doesn’t take any more time to use these strategies — in fact, it takes a lot less time than doing every task and project yourself — and all the hours you get back are an opportunity to expand your vision and aim for even greater things.