How Leaders Learn to Let It Go

The toughest thing for the entrepreneurial tech leader is when the business grows to where they can't be involved in everything. It's a transition many struggles to make.

Take heart! In this episode of the podcast, Paul Simkins talks about a simple to apply rule that helps you delegate more effectively and let go to get growth.

Plus, a great recipe for Cowboy Soup. And if you have a favorite outdoor cooking recipe you would like to share, send it to paul@BoldlyLead.com. If we put it in an episode we'll let you know and give you credit for it on the show.

You can get a copy of Paul's eBook 15 Innovative Ways to Show Employees You Care and Not Break the Bank by emailing him at paul@BoldlyLead.com.

Join the discussions at our Podcast Facebook group here.
Learn more about Paul Simkins on his website.

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Transcript

Producer: 0:00

The tech leaders toolbox podcast is brought to you by Paul Simkins and the bully LEAD program, focusing on helping tech leaders like you, and the frustration of low performing teams, and losing excellent employees, so they can increase productivity by 50%. Go home on time, and sleep better at night.

Paul Simkins: 0:23

Hello, and welcome to the tech leaders toolbox. I'm Paul Simkins. And we're here because how you lead today determines how your team succeeds tomorrow. This is Episode 55 of the podcast. And well, this episode is going to speak mostly to the tech entrepreneurs out there, especially the ones who are just experiencing their first pangs of growth, yet, don't tune off yet, because I want to tell you that there's probably something here for every leader out there, including, of course, this week's outdoor cooking recipe, are you ready? Let's go. You don't have a word for many a small business my day and being an entrepreneur myself now. Well, I've had the unique opportunity to see how businesses grow and how the entrepreneur grows or doesn't grow with it. It's a great example of what john Maxwell likes to call a leadership lid. Because the businesses will grow to a certain point and then either slow down drastically and stagnate. Or they innovate, they change. And they find new ways to go. And they can move to that next level. And what I found is, it's not a factor of the economy, or industry changes. But it's more a matter of the lack of changes, internally, the entrepreneur simply doesn't grow his leadership enough to be able to be ready for how the organization needs to change, to accommodate corporate growth. See, the whole principle of the leadership lid is that john Maxwell believes that each and every one of us has that capacity to be a leader. But how much leadership we show. And how that leadership improves, is a lid on our own personal growth, and on our organizational growth. And no matter how much we try, we're not going to get above that leadership lid, unless we find a way to push the lid up higher. And we do that through the ways in which we grow and develop ourselves to be more effective as a leader, for ourselves and for organization. And this is a tough thing for entrepreneurs because well, you know, write it say I went through it, you're going through it probably and or have been through it. When you first start out, you're quite often the only person doing anything. Or at the very least you're everything revolves around you, right? It was your vision that started the company to begin with your initiative that got things off the ground? Well, so naturally, you feel that you and you alone, are responsible for success or failure of this venture. And so you're the executive management, you're the accounting department, you're the sales manager, the the fulfillment department, the development head, and well, perhaps even the janitor. Again, I've been all that. And then success happens. sucks, sales are up customers can't get enough of you. You have to add staff, you have to hire an appoint department managers, you have to expand your inventory install processes, you have to get more office space, you have to create new products, you have to adopt more formalized accounting procedures and on and on and on. And well, you're spending more and more of your time in the office, you're being pulled into multiple directions. And things are bottlenecking. And they're bottlenecking because they have to wait for you to come up with a solution or for you to put your stamp of approval on one hand this. This is the crisis moment. This is when it becomes a crisis because you haven't learned to let go. And before you think I'm pointing a finger here, I can say this about me It became a crisis when I hadn't learned to let go when the company has grown to the point where things are waiting on you. And then it's time to decide what things you want to keep control of, and what you want to let go of, and trust others to carry the load. That word trust comes up again, it's critical. You have to be able to you have to bring people on your team that you can trust. And the same goes, how do you learn to trust somebody, by trusting them, you have to turn things on over when you can let go of things and you can trust the people you've hired to pick up the slack, then the pace of the business can continue and perhaps even increase. You can grow, the organization can grow. Everyone benefits. But if you insist on keeping your finger in every pie, most of those pies aren't going to come out right? And you're going to get weary, you're going to get burned out. And then another small business bites the dust. Alright, so what do you do about it? Well, you what you want to do is you want to apply what we call the 8020 rule. The basic premise of the 8020 rule is this 80% of your efforts should be directed towards the 20% of things that you and only you can do, such as visioning for the future, and preparing your legacy, things like that. So you'll look at what you do now. And think about the things you do daily and the things you do weekly. And if someone else in the company can do it at least 80% as good as you let it go. You turn it over to them. you communicate expectations. And by communicating expectations. It's the what not the how to communicate your expectations. equip them with what they need to get the job done. Let it go. Doesn't mean you don't, you know, you don't ask for regular reports, it doesn't mean that you don't keep them on track and focused. But it means that you let them do it. And you let them do it their way, as long as you're clear about what you expect the outcome to be. And of course, making sure it is consistent with the values of the organization. If it doesn't focus on the primary thrust of your business, that's another reason to let it go and let somebody else do it. And I gotta tell you, I emphasize this because this is such an important step in your leadership growth. Not only because of what it does for you, but also because what it does for your business. And even more importantly, what it does for the team members that you have around you. It allows others to grow and to become more engaged, and to take more responsibility for the profitability of your business. Think how much more productive how much more profitable your business can be, when you're not the only one worried about it. Teddy Roosevelt once said, The best executive is the one who has sent enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self restraint enough to keep from meddling with him while they do it. I'll give you another similar quote from a man I admired a man named Ed Fernandez, who many many years ago formed a company called Shere Khan. It was a government contracting business or contracting business in general, I should say, working on government contracts primarily, but they did corporate private businesses as well. And what Ed used to brag about, and it was one of the reasons I admired him is he bragged about that the entire success of his organization was due to the fact that he hired people smarter than him. And then he got out of the way, and he let them do their jobs. And even after Ed tragically died in a plane accident, the business carried on for a while after that, because he had smart people in place, who are able to keep it going. So apply that 8020 rule, learn to let go of the 80% of things that you don't really need to be doing. And that somebody else can do at least 80% as good as you factor. The reality is for a lot of those things. There's somebody in your organization You can actually do it better than you do it, whether you want to admit that or not. And by letting it go and letting them loose, you get even better results. Right? Sounds easy, doesn't it? Yeah, it's not even close. You're going to resist this likely resist this vehemently. I did. After all, how can you let any of this go? How can let somebody else do it? You're the one who had the vision? How can anyone else know enough to do it the way you want it done. But the critical point is, you want to move forward, you must, and you need to understand it won't be done, the way you want it done. You'll get the results, just not exactly the way you would have done it. And you know what? It'll be okay. It'll be okay. If you take the time to communicate expectations. Again, the what? Not the hell, if you equip them with what they need to get the job done, if you support them. And if you let go of everything being done, the way you would have done it in favor of getting the end goal, you will achieve success. So here's a couple of action items for you. Let's apply that 8020 rule. Think about, write down a list of the 20% of things that you and only you can do for your organization. Be honest with yourself on this only the things that only you can truly do. Then take write down a list of those 80% of things that don't go into the first category, make a list of what you're going to let go of. And next to each one write in the name of the person to whom you'll release it. And then the final step, start tomorrow. Not next week, not next month, not next quarter, tomorrow. Because again, that law of diminishing probabilities. The longer you wait, the less likely you are to do it time drags on, it becomes too late. Do it tomorrow. Learn to let go to get the results that you want. We'll be back in a moment.

Producer: 12:36

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Paul Simkins: 13:06

All right, we're back. And in this part of the show, I always like to share my love of cooking, especially outdoor cooking. I do have a Dutch ovens. I love to cook over open fire with Dutch ovens. I love to do cook, crank up my smoker there and do a lot of smoke barbecue cooking, and I've got a grill. And I love it so much. I've actually created a really fun group out there. It's on facebook facebook group called smoke and ash. And I invite you to come out and join us whether you're an experienced outdoor cooker, whether you're brand new to it, or you're just interested in it, come on out and join us it's a lot of fun. And it's free to join no fee, right and we just, we all sit out there, we share recipes and ideas, we share our gadgets that we have our cooking gear that we have. A lot of people take great pride in their cooking gear. And we even talk about like what's coming up lately. Like, lately, it was what everybody was making for the Super Bowl parties, right? That they were gonna have small as they were gonna be because of the pandemic but they talked about the recipes are gonna make So again, it's called smoke a dash and invite you to come out and join us. And so in this part of the show, I always share an outdoor cooking recipe. And these recipes, by the way are available on that smoke and ash Facebook group so you can go out there and get them and this week I'm going to share a recipe called cowboy soup. Now this is from a cookbook that I love to use called the geezers cookbook written especially for outdoor cooking. So this is a nice winter warm me up called cowboy suit. So for this you're going to need to potatoes which you want to peel and cut into chunks. about a pound of ground beef. Chop up an onion, get a can of corn canopies can have green beans can have baked beans can have tomato soup, and a can of crushed tomatoes. Now you're also going to need about two tablespoons of chili powder, a bayleaf and some nutmeg. So the first thing you do is your brown the ground beef and the onions together. And if it produces too much liquid drain off a little bit of it. Then take all the rest of the ingredients except for the seasonings and dump them into the pot with the ground beef and the onions. Don't bother draining out the liquid out of the cans of the veggies. Just dump everything in there. And then you're going to put it on about medium medium high heat, and you're going to cook it until the potatoes are done, which is going to take about 1015 minutes. Then at that point, you're going to add in your chili powder, the bayleaf and the nutmeg. And again, for the nutbag few dashes about a quarter teaspoon, maybe more, give it a little extra byte. And add that in stirred in real good cook it another 30 minutes, good to go. And serve that with a nice crusty bread, like an Italian bread or French bread with a nice crust on the outside, soft on the inside, and salad and well you got a meal that's gonna fill you up and make you feel satisfied. And that's it, it's cowboy soup, I think you're really gonna like it. And again, don't forget, you can get that out on my Facebook group, smoke a dash, or just send me an email at Paul at boldly lead.com. And by the way, if you have a favorite outdoor cooking recipe you would like to share with us, you can come up with that and share that with us on that Facebook. Well, you can come out and share it just send me an email at Paul at boldly lead.com share that recipe with me. If I use the recipe on the show, I'll give you a credit for it. And I'll let you know what episode is going to be on. But again, just send that to Paul at boldly lead.com. Well, folks, that's about all we have time for this weekend. And and I got it, I want to share something with you a little confession with you. I've recently picked up a project that is consuming a lot of my time during the day. And it's going to consume a lot of my time for the next two years. It's a major project and really happy to be working on it. It's great work and I'm really enjoying it. But it's a challenge because it's a challenge to put out this podcast. But I want to keep doing this because I want to keep adding value to you. I want to keep adding helping you become the leader you need to be so that you can be more effective, your teams can be more productive, you can make better decisions, and you can be more effective leading your tech organization. And so I do this for free. So I want to ask a favor from you to help me and help keep me going here. If you listen to this podcast on a Apple podcast or any kind of service like that, be sure to leave us a five star review because people pay attention to that. Right? Leave us a five star review. Let people know you enjoy this podcast and that you listen to it regularly. Share it with your friends bring more people in I I want to I want to get a lot of people around here on this. I want to add value to as many people as I can. And so I need your help to do that. Will you do that for me? I'd really appreciate it. Alright folks, that's again, that's all we have time for this week until the next time, go out and be the leader. You were meant to be