RULE 11

Offload as much as you can – or dare

The good manager, and that is you from now on, knows that they manage events, processes, situations, strategies but never people. Look, let’s imagine you have a big garden and decide to employ a gardener. Do you manage the gardener? No. They manage themselves quite nicely, thank you. Your job is to manage the garden. You’ll decide what to plant and when and where. The gardener, like a spade or a wheelbarrow, becomes a tool in that garden and a tool you can use to manage your garden effectively. But you don’t manage the gardener. They manage themselves. You tell them what you want done and they get on with it. You delegate and they dig and delve and plant and prune and tend and weed. The plants actually manage themselves as well; neither you nor the gardener actually grows anything – you both manage. The gardener is your useful assistant, your tool to getting stuff done.

Now it makes sense to give the gardener as much to do with the decision-making process as possible to free you up for long-term strategy, seeing the big picture, seasonal planning and perusing seed catalogues while sitting in the shade sipping a cooling Pimm’s.

There is no point standing over the gardener while they mow lawns, weed beds, prune trees and the like. It is better to give them the job to do and then let them get on with it. Once they have finished you can check their work and make sure it is up to scratch. And then you probably won’t need to do that again – don’t keep checking.

And that basically is the secret of good management. Give ’em a job to do and let them get on with it. Check once or twice to make sure they’ve done it the way you want it done and then next time just let them get on with it. Increasingly give them more and more to do and stand back more and more from the people processes and concentrate instead on the planning processes. Build your team and then trust them to get on with it. Sometimes this will backfire and people will play up, skive off, do things badly – and hey, that’ll be entirely your fault because you are the manager and it’s your team. No, that’s serious, it is entirely down to you. Read on and we’ll find ways to make sure it doesn’t happen – well, not too often anyway.