How to Let Go and Equip Your Team to Take Ownership • An Interview with Chad Nicely

To the degree that your team can see how their everyday actions are fulfilling your organizations goals and moving the company forward, they will feel empowered to take action.

That’s a loaded statement, so let’s break it down: as the owner of your business, you’re probably doing way too much work yourself and not delegating that work effectively to your team. And one of the most common reasons this ends up happening is that the business owner perceives that their team just isn’t “invested” as much as the business owner is.

And it’s not that the team is incompetent, lazy, or doesn’t care. It’s just hard to compare the levels of investment between someone who owns a company and holds it on their shoulders, and the people that are there day-to-day. The result is this: that business owner holds onto way too much because “I’d do a better job of it anyways.”

As Chad mentions during this interview, a lot of it comes down to mindset. Your team will never be invested to the same level you are, and you must accept that.

However, that doesn’t mean you should give up on trying to get more buy-in from them. And the single best way I have found to get my team to take on more accountability, more decision-making initiative, and more monkeys, is deploying a one-page strategic plan to show them exactly how what they do every day is contributing to the larger mission of the organization.

By illustrating how this quarter’s goals help achieve the yearly objectives, and how those yearly objectives contribute to the 3-5 year thrusts, and how those thrusts move you toward the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, and how that goal has been reverse-engineered from the core values of the organization, your team will see that everything makes sense in context. And they will buy into that vision.

Culture is something you can train. And with that culture of emergent leadership, you’ll suddenly find yourself a lot more willing to delegate.