When to lead, and when not to.

If you have a five person operation, you need to lead.  Those four people need to understand what the goals of the organization are, and what their jobs are, and you need to communicate, train, and support them as to exactly what they should do.

But this changes when you have 50 people.  You’ve recruited the best people you can find.  How can you know what each employee is supposed to be doing – all those functions and the intricacies of how they’re done, when you have 7 departments now?  If you haven’t changed your leadership style since you were a five person shop, you will be the bottleneck and limiting factor. You couldn’t possibly know the best way for eveyone to do their jobs and manage them the way you used to.  

If you maintain a command and control leadership style, where you need to approve everything and authorize every move, and be the source of all new ideas that get implemented, you will hit the wall. You will be working a lot and be maxed out.  Your best employees will leave, and you’ll have lost the opportunity to have great specialized minds really help.

Instead, you need to know when and where you must let go and let others lead. Maybe you should hang on to this function or that one.  But maybe you should let go of this one or that one too.  Letting go allows you to focus your time and energy on creating value in other ways.

You have to let employees who are smarter than you and better than you in a given area take control of their domains without your interference. Sure, communicate the vision, make sure all the pieces fit together, and measure results. But get yourself out of the middle when you have exceeded your limit of skill or capacity.  

Sooner is better than later.