After excelling as an individual contributor, you were selected to become a people manager. Can you succeed? Not if you aren’t willing to re-learn what success looks like. If you want to make your team members good at their jobs, you need to get yourself comfortable with their mistakes.
Giving your team total responsibility is the difference between training a team of diligent executors, and growing your people into critical thinkers who can tackle bigger and bigger problems.
You may be tempted to handle the ‘hard’ stuff — like jumping into the fray whenever workloads get overwhelming or when higher executives are watching results. You may be tempted to think that only you can truly champion the team.
After all, a screw-up from your team could reflect poorly on you, and you’re good at your job, so you aren’t about to let that happen. And in the end, the team (with you at the front) ships the results and gets accolades, so everything’s great, right?
