Do you really trust your team?

It starts so innocently. Checking in. Opening their email account after hours. Fixing things here and there.

And while training and managing your team is a necessary facet of being a business owner, it can quickly cross the line from “overseeing” to “controlling.”

When you’re checking in the question has to be asked, “do you really trust your team?”

So how do you know if you’re checking for quality, controlling someone like a puppet or your team member is actually bad at their job?

Here’s an example for you:

Email is a valuable communication tool, however…
If you’re controlling you might write and rewrite emails to make the smallest changes based on style, sure that your team member will screw up the simplest formatting or miss a comma.

Quality control is verifying the email has the right style, message and links before it goes out to minimize mistakes.

What if your team member is just bad at sending emails and forgets to double check the spelling, links or make updates? Maybe it’s not the position for them.

My own personal litmus test is to ask “have I made it abundantly clear, through written systems and examples and training how to do the task I’m asking? If mistakes are still being made then we either need to re-train or re-assign the task.

BUT If I’m constantly changing the expectations, haven’t done full training, or make it up as I go then the failure lies in me – not the team member. Since “oops I changed my mind, again” isn’t a great excuse to micromanage an employee’s work, I use this circumstances as a sign to brush up our training and teaching.

Action Step: This is my favorite assignment for clients. Next week take off 1 full day if you can rearrange any calls/appointments and evaluate the next day how your team works without you.