As a Supervisor or Manager, winning and succeeding feels good, sometimes really good. And, have you noticed that quite often it’s those times that you rallied your team, got them involved along with you, that you tend to remember with a smile of real pride?
As a Supervisor or Manager, rank may give you authority; but it does not make you a Leader. Leaders know when it is time to let someone learn from a mistake. And, as their boss, you need to learn together, with them, …it’s called investing in both of your joint futures. And when they learn, you “celebrate the win”.
Stop long enough to recognize when you might delegate a task; but then, you hang on to it and do it, once again, yourself. That’s when that little voice convinces you that “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.” (Boy that’s self-serving.) Not really. But it sounds a bit shallow to me. When you invest the time and effort to teach and show people “how to”; you actually get a return on the effort. You get more time to do the things you can’t right now. Try it sometime. Dare to be amazed.
Remember, your role as a Supervisor or Manager is to get more things done through directing the efforts of those who report to you, in order to produce more than you might be able to produce individually. You spend more time with the people you work with than you do with members of your own families. Why not have high expectations of how that time is used?
Some times it is OK to be selfish when it comes to the quality of decisions being made and the performance standards you tolerate in the behaviors of the people you work with.
Help the people who report to you to fail-forward.