Are you the bindweed in your business?

I want to share an interesting conversation I had recently with a control freak.

Business Owners come to us for help to escape the day-to-day operation of their business, but the truth is that so many find it hard to let go of their role, even the small tasks.

Some believe that they are the only ones that can do a certain task to their exacting standards, and we come across this so often that a huge part of our work is changing the mindset of the business owner to let them know that they can trust their team with the right systems in place. They can take a step back to work on growing their business, while it runs smoothly without them, or with only a little input from them.

This particular ‘control freak’ (and I use that phrase because I can – I was one too!) was telling me how he hates to delegate – doesn’t trust his employees to do anything without some sort of supervision, because they cock things up, make mistakes, take longer to do the job than he would.

“I check EVERYTHING’ he said, ‘I don’t want my customers to have anything but a perfect service’.

It’s the perfect excuse for the control freak – “I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for my customers.”

Drives me nuts.

Here’s the thing, for those of you who recognise that you may be borderline, if not full-blown freaks, you’re keeping yourself stuck in that rut we talked about recently.

Just like the bindweed in your garden – you know the one with the pretty flower that pretends its trying to make your garden look lovely, while its tentacles set about destroying it? You too are strangling the growth of your people and your business.

You’ve forgotten that someone let you make mistakes when you were learning, someone gave you room to grow and develop, someone recognised that mistakes are how we all learn.  You’ve forgotten that all of the successful people you look up to have built their success on a bucketload of failures, and much bigger failures and mistakes than any of your people might make if you gave them their head.

You want to limit mistakes?  Have systems.  Set standards. Give your people proper training in how to use your systems to achieve those standards.  Manage their performance.  Reward good performance and re-train when it’s not so good.

People want to learn and develop, they want to grow – it’s much more of a motivator than money.  Give them ownership of their job, help them to feel like they belong to something, that you’re relying on them to help you build something that you can all be proud of.

I saw this quote on Facebook, and it is oh so true – ‘A team is not a group of people who work together.  A team is a group of people who trust one another.’

Trust your people and build a high performing team, that runs your high performing business.

Get control of your freak.  Pull out the bindweed that’s stifling your business.

Do one thing: Want to see where you’re at right now? Complete our Systems Scorecard to see where you’re at, right now, in your business.