As a manager, you have many tools at your disposal to help your team members grow. But just like physical tools, when you force fit the wrong tool to the wrong use, you can end up doing more harm than good.
By way of illustration, I’d like to look at four specific tools today. And I’d like to compare initiating tools with finishing tools for team members with low capability or high capability. Now, to clarify, the measure of capability is not a raw characteristic of your team member. It’s a characteristic of your team member’s ability with a specific skill relative to your own ability with that same skill.
When your ability clearly surpasses that of your team member, then the initiating tool of training leads to a finishing tool of delegating. You’ll show them how to do the work, and then you’ll give them a chance to follow your lead and do that same kind of work on their own.
And there is certainly a time and place for managers to train their team members in order to delegate work to them. This is especially true when you’re grooming someone to advance in their career beyond their current position.
But those of us with technology backgrounds can tend to overuse that pair of tools. We want to be the hammer and chisel when we ought to be the scaffold.
In many cases – probably far more than we’re comfortable with – it’s the initiating tool of empowering that’s better suited, leading to the finishing tool of supporting. Now, I don’t want to quibble over words. In some popular models, delegating includes a wide range of activity including this idea of empowering and supporting. But for our conversation, I want to highlight the importance of you as the leader letting go of how someone accomplishes a result. Empower them to make their own decisions, and then support them as a person regardless of the outcome, even if a failure provides another opportunity for targeted training.
If you’d like to explore the use of different growth tools in your own organization, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to begin the conversation.
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