No More Mr. Fix-It

It’s hard for my business to create additional value if I’m the bottleneck through which all issues and concerns are filtered. It’s simply not sustainable for a company of 30-plus to report to me directly, particularly when I’m at my best only in a crisis. I’ve known this for a long time, but I’ve found it hard to break out of that mentality. It took a two-day meeting with my two senior managers earlier this year for me to come to the conclusion that Mandalay must reposition itself if we’re to grow.

I’ve been avoiding this decision for a few reasons. I’m nervous about communicating this change to my staff, as the self-critic in my head can immediately see at least three ways for things to go wrong.

One: the ever-present fear of failure. I think to myself, “ (expletive)!! what happens if it doesn’t work out? Then I’ll have to acknowledge more failure, and take on further work…” and on and on.

Two: I’m worried about the effect that it’ll have on other people. Either they don’t respond well to change, or they’ll feel like they’re not being rightly appreciated. I’m quite conscious of other peoples’ feelings when it comes to change.

Three: there’s a high level of ‘the unknown’ around this decision. This is one of those cases where, if the weakest link in the chain doesn’t get out of the way, he’s holding the company back. I don’t want to do that any longer.

The main challenge for me, from a leadership perspective, is to be able to provide a vision for my staff, and to be able to inspire them on that vision, even though I don’t know all the answers. I find that really hard, because it’s easy for me to know all the answers in other situations and yet here in my own life — I feel I come up short. Here, I know that we’re taking steps, and I know where we’re roughly heading but the detail is yet to reveal itself.

Still, I have to plunge into this with an at times unwilling enthusiasm.

I also struggle to have trust in others to the point where I can say, “here you go, I’ve put so-and-so in charge of this now, and they’re going to come up with the answer to that”. It’s hard for me to not feel like a failure because I can’t do it myself. Even though I know that this is actually sign of good leadership — the ability to delegate, and let go — it still feels like a bit of a failure to me at this point.

A short attention span is a classic entrepreneurial trait. I can be guilty of that, too. I have a great propensity to go, “great, right, this is now someone else’s problem!” and run off to the next thing that I’m working on. If I don’t maintain the right rhythm and check-ins with the staff in charge, though, then we might run into trouble. I believe this is the element that’s most likely to fail, and that’s what I intend to pay closest attention to.

I still measure my own effectiveness by how much I get done, and not necessarily about how much I create through others. In six months, I’d love to be able to comfortably sit in a quiet space one day per week and look through a whole series of reports from my empowered managers. I’d love to be able to coach and manage them around that data, while I keep my mind on the company’s overall vision and direction.

I’d much prefer to operate that way, rather than feeling like I currently do: that inescapable mentality which says, “I have to make 25 phone calls today. I have to solve 15 issues. I have to be the solution to all of the problems.” That needs to be not where I find my self worth.