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You Only Grow By Letting Go

Business Quarterly -- December 1996
By: Leslie Yerkes

Most entrepreneurs feel they're the only ones who can successfully grow their business. The truth is, if you manage every detail and make every decision, you are maintaining a strangle hold and your business will never grow larger than you.

In the process of growing our business, we often TELL employees exactly what to do. The disservice we do in the process is to deny them the opportunity to fail. All real learning comes from experience and failure is the most effective teaching experience. The more your employees can operate like you and consider themselves owners of their jobs and even owners of the company, the more ultimate success both you and they will have, and the more your company will grow.

Here are the secrets to unlimited growth.

1. You can't grow if you don't let go. If you know you have a strangle hold on your business, let go. If no one can do anything without you seeing it, approving it, or correcting it, you are probably exercising too much control.
2. Letting go isn't dumping, it's delegating. We tend to assign tasks instead of assigning results. Delegating means to establish the result you want, suggest a route of action, and let the employee do it. Reward the result and help them analyze by asking what they would do differently and what they would do better so that they can improve the next time.
3. Control the process, not the people. It's not possible for you to control the behavior of others so why try? What you can do is build a process which ensures quality, customer service, continuity, and consistency.
4. Learn to ask for help. If you let your employees do more of the thinking, all you have to do is direct it. Ask them: "What will be the result if you do that?" and let them find the answers. It will save you time, and they will do the learning.
5. Work at it consistently. Under stress we all revert to old habits. That's why it's so hard to lose weight. Or to change any behavior. It takes a long time to create a habit. Consistency is the key. Keep at it. Make letting go be a habit.
6. Understand what triggers your controlling urges. When you know what makes you leap in and take over, you can control it. And that's the first step to changing your behavior.
7. Set them up to succeed. It's your responsibility to establish clear expectations so you BOTH know what constitutes success. Encourage them to go on and they will happily perform again; but correct their behavior and they will silently await your next orders.