As an avid listener of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, I listened to a recently uploaded episode complementary to his new book Tools of Titans (review incoming) that covered a number of tough questions he encouraged everybody to ask themselves. One of the questions he shared was, "How would you run your business if you were only allowed to work that business two hours a week?"
Ferriss was, at one point, the owner of a health supplement company. Upon asking himself that question, he did a number of things, but the thing that stuck out to me most was how he handled people that worked on his behalf. Slowly but surely, he allotted more and more liberty to make cost-based decisions that he normally would have had involvement in. Along with that, he admitted that he had to be okay with letting some "bad" things happen.
If you've caught on by now, this post is really about micromanagement. In fact, you could arguably re-title this post "Key Competency #4: Dropping the Micromanagement". I still like my title better, which is why it stands as is!
Anyway, we've talked frequently on this blog about our limitations. Specifically, we are limited in our knowledge and limited in our time. There is no possible way that a single person can know everything, and the one resource every single person is constrained by is time. We simply can't do it all.
That said, like Tim Ferriss, we have to be okay with letting go of some things. I call it having a little bit of "not-care-itude". We're never going to be able to control every single event, so we have to make a choice: we can either try (and inevitably fail) to control everything, or we can spend our time focused on other, more important things.
It might seem like the obvious answer here, but it clearly still happens all the time. We've all worked with somebody who has micromanaged a project. Heck, we ourselves have probably micromanaged a project, perhaps inadvertently.
Being able to let go of small things is good from multiple perspectives. We already mentioned that it's good for yourself because it enables you to focus your time on more important matters, but there's a clear benefit for the people around you. When you allow people to make decisions for themselves, it instills in them a sense of appreciation and empowerment. That's really important for leadership. Obviously, you want to ensure these folks can handle what is thrown at them, but I would encourage more of a default toward enabling them over constraining them.
That's it for this post! I hope you find this post and the other "Key Competency" add a lot of value to your lives. I think you'll find that this idea gets easier and easier to embrace over time. It might be difficult the first time you let go of the small things, but I assure you it gets better over time!
Ferriss was, at one point, the owner of a health supplement company. Upon asking himself that question, he did a number of things, but the thing that stuck out to me most was how he handled people that worked on his behalf. Slowly but surely, he allotted more and more liberty to make cost-based decisions that he normally would have had involvement in. Along with that, he admitted that he had to be okay with letting some "bad" things happen.
If you've caught on by now, this post is really about micromanagement. In fact, you could arguably re-title this post "Key Competency #4: Dropping the Micromanagement". I still like my title better, which is why it stands as is!
Anyway, we've talked frequently on this blog about our limitations. Specifically, we are limited in our knowledge and limited in our time. There is no possible way that a single person can know everything, and the one resource every single person is constrained by is time. We simply can't do it all.
That said, like Tim Ferriss, we have to be okay with letting go of some things. I call it having a little bit of "not-care-itude". We're never going to be able to control every single event, so we have to make a choice: we can either try (and inevitably fail) to control everything, or we can spend our time focused on other, more important things.
It might seem like the obvious answer here, but it clearly still happens all the time. We've all worked with somebody who has micromanaged a project. Heck, we ourselves have probably micromanaged a project, perhaps inadvertently.
Being able to let go of small things is good from multiple perspectives. We already mentioned that it's good for yourself because it enables you to focus your time on more important matters, but there's a clear benefit for the people around you. When you allow people to make decisions for themselves, it instills in them a sense of appreciation and empowerment. That's really important for leadership. Obviously, you want to ensure these folks can handle what is thrown at them, but I would encourage more of a default toward enabling them over constraining them.
That's it for this post! I hope you find this post and the other "Key Competency" add a lot of value to your lives. I think you'll find that this idea gets easier and easier to embrace over time. It might be difficult the first time you let go of the small things, but I assure you it gets better over time!
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