Establishing the boundaries
Your knowledge of how to achieve the goal becomes especially important as you move from being hands-on to being a task manager, as you move from phase one to phase two in the diagram we showed you before, the Life Cycle of a Manager. As you begin to have other people around to help you, you couldn’t be more certain that you know how to get things done. After all, you invented the method, and all these other folks are new. So, you’ll likely be inclined to instruct others to do things as you did (“do it my way”).
“Once a manager acquires a few employees, she can’t possibly watch them all closely enough to ensure that they do everything the way that she would. Besides, she shouldn’t be watching employees that closely anyway. She should be planning her business, determining what her customers want, and coaching her team to achieve the goals.
“So, we give the employees as much responsibility and authority as they can assume to reach their goals. The less intervention required by us, the more time we have for other things.
“But we can’t merely set them loose. That would be chaos. We need to help them understand their boundaries.
“Let me give you an analogy. Suppose that we decided to send someone on a road trip to a specific city and told them that all they had to do was get to that city.
“We might find that they arrived in a timely manner without incident. We might also find, however, that they got there much later than we hoped or that they got four speeding tickets on the way. Without any guidance, or boundaries, anything might be possible.
“In our diagram here, titled Enabling Empowerment—Establishing the Boundaries, the employee has a goal, but we’re not allowing him to do absolutely anything to reach it. We’re asking him to work within defined boundaries, ground rules, and principles. And some of these boundaries are obvious. For example, we don’t want them to do anything illegal or unethical.
“You’ll notice that one of the items on the list is the position description. This is the detailed description of the goals and responsibilities of the position that we discussed previously. All of the other items are common to everyone in the company.
“So, let’s be clear about what this diagram tells our employees. It says that they can achieve their goals however they see fit, as long as they stay within bounds. You’ll notice also that “time” is one of the boundaries—the goals must be achieved within a certain time period.
“These ideas can be challenging to a manager, especially a manager who is new to this system. I know that they were a big challenge for me when I first started using this system.
“It drove me nuts to watch people take a path that was not the one I knew was right. Sure, I wanted them to make their goals, and I told myself that I’d let them do it in their own way.
“Most of the time, I just left them alone at first, assuming that they’d know what to do in their jobs. At some point, though, I’d discover that some folks weren’t doing things the way I expected. So, I’d jump in with both feet to correct them. And I did this even when they were clearly in bounds. I just didn’t like the way they did things.
“But they didn’t really want my help. They accused me of micromanagement, and they clearly didn’t want that. Anyway, through time, and with some coaching that I got from some business colleagues, I finally learned to let go. After all, the goal is the goal; the goal is not to do it my way.”