The ROI of Letting Go
Lisa had been sitting at her dining room table, updating her books, for so long that the screen had gone blurry thirty minutes ago. She loved owning a business. She enjoyed doing what she was good at: providing excellent marketing services to other business owners. She was grateful for her amazing team. But she was exhausted all the time.
“I don’t know how long I can keep this up,” she thought to herself. “Maybe instead of trying to grow, we should scale back to serve a more manageable number of clients.”
Most business owners struggle to keep their arms around a growing and increasingly complex organization. We provide hands-on client service, decisions flow through us, and we closely manage the business functions all while remaining the “face” of the business in the community. We hope this will ensure a high level of excellence and will keep us from being surprised by a problem.
The issue is that it puts tremendous stress on us as owners. And ironically, this approach actually devalues our business. By staying so deeply involved in every aspect of the business, we make ourselves the linchpin of success. It can’t outgrow our personal capacity, so the overall value of our business plummets.
Control is the villain in this story. People tend to believe that if we let go of control our performance will suffer and everything will fall apart.
The truth is actually the opposite. Control is an illusion. The attempt to maintain it hurts our business more than it helps.
The more we try to exercise control, the more things tend to go haywire.
Don’t misunderstand--control isn’t bad. It’s a basic human desire. Feeling in control reduces stress and anxiety and increases feelings of safety, security, and confidence. But how much control do we really have over our business?
Think of leading a business like washing with a bar of soap. Hold the soap too loosely and you’ll drop it on the floor. Grasp it too tightly and it will squirt out of your hands, hit the wall, the shower door, the faucet, and slide around the tub for 10 seconds before finally coming to rest in the least accessible place to retrieve it.
When we hold on to our business too tightly it often slips out of our hands. We think we’re ensuring excellence, but our team members feel like we don’t trust them. When decisions have to be bumped up to us, our clients’ issues can’t be resolved quickly, and they can feel like they’re getting the runaround. We hire people who will do what we want in the way we want believing it means things will flow smoothly, but in reality that limits the ability for creative solutions, innovation, making the best possible decisions—all of which require multiple approaches.
The more we try to exercise control, the more tired we get and the more annoyed everyone around us gets.
What’s the answer? Letting go of the illusion of control and unleashing the potency of empowerment instead.
Empowering others raises the odds of success.
The most reliable indicator of a leader’s future success is the commitment level of their followers. If our team members feel “meh” about our leadership and direction, then we have a “meh” chance of healthy growth. On the other hand, if our team members feel so strongly about our leadership that they would run through a brick wall for us like the Kool-Aid man, then we’ll have to work hard to fail.
The single strongest factor in team loyalty is whether or not they feel that their leader is invested in them personally.
A close friend of mine, we’ll call him Joe, was navigating his organization through dangerous waters. A sluggish economy and recent changes in their industry meant revenue was down while costs were up. He was seriously considering layoffs. But when he broached the idea with his leadership team, he was surprised at their response.
“We’d rather trim budgets as much as we can and take personal pay cuts than let team members go,” they said. And they were absolutely unanimous in their opinion.
After running the numbers, they discovered this wouldn’t be enough to ride out the storm. Against his better judgment, Joe agreed to let his leaders talk with each of their teams about what to do next. The result? Every single team member willingly took a temporary pay cut.
That kind of loyalty is hard-earned. It starts by caring about your people and empowering them to do what it is they do best. After that, the odds of success are much higher and the path to growth is much easier.
Empowering others is the surest way to healthy growth.
Healthy growth doesn’t result from our direct involvement in every aspect of our business. Instead, it comes as we empower team members to fulfill their potential. When we let others take responsibility, make decisions, and do excellent work, we multiply our growth capacity.
A short order cook may be able to handle most of the food preparation in a small roadside diner. But feeding a date night crowd in a busy urban night spot requires a head chef with a brigade of other cooks, busboys and servers to get the job done.
When we empower our team members, we mobilize a dozen sets of eyes to maintain quality control, not just the two in our own head. We harness the minds and creativity of every team member to solve problems. The thing we (hopefully) hired them for in the first place. As we raise their expectations of themselves, they engage more fully, serve clients more effectively, and work together more joyfully.
The ROI of letting go of the illusion of control is extremely high. Team members are happier. Trust increases. Systems improve as everyone in the business is given authority to point out problems and offer solutions. Service quality and client satisfaction improves.
And a wonderful side benefit is that we don’t have to carry everything on our shoulders. We now have brothers and sisters in arms who are fighting alongside us for the growth and success of our business. Which means we’re no longer like Lisa, sitting alone at our dining room tables into the wee hours of the morning, straining our eyes every night.