I used to be a shitty footballer.
Not because I did not have good moves, but because I had a terrible habit of simply running towards wherever the ball was at the moment. Once the opponent had the ball, I raced towards them as fast as I could, effectively ignoring the fact that my teammates where marking the opponents already.
You see, the challenge I had is that I didn’t trust my teammates. Where they doing their best to get the ball back? Are they really creatively trying to get a goal for us? Where they aggressive enough? And so, I always made a mess by getting in everyone’s way by playing the whole field and of course, wasting all my energy.
Things changed the day it dawned on me that I had to trust my teammates and chill in my position, wait for them to hand me the ball. I then also made another decision; no matter what happens, I would not blame anybody for our team’s loss because no matter what happened, we had all tried our best. (Ok, the second decision did not work too well, we were teenage boys, we always had to criticise someone 😀 as it makes every other person feel better)
I remember the words of Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group this morning: “Leadership is not about someone at the top of the trees shouting down orders; that is not leadership. Sounds more like dictatorship” . I believe the duty of a leader is merely to set the mission, then empower their followers to get it done and then get out of the way! Some great leaders are know for micro-managing their staff, but I argue that it is not as empowering and productive as trusting your team and not getting in the way.
Sooner or later, it dawns on you that you do not have the best ideas after all. It dawns on you that your team; the people you trained can now get things done easier and faster then you ever could, and you just slow everyone down by insisting you want to be involved in everything.
Once you pick your team and assign something for them to do. Go to sleep and trust your team.
I am half-joking about the sleep part.
Trust your team.
Even if you don’t score or you get beaten black and blue; do not criticise your team and assign blames. Rather trust that they did their best and acted in good faith.
If you do not trust them enough to leave them to do the work, then you should not be assigning tasks to them in the first place.
