Doing Our People’s Jobs……

One of the biggest mistakes I see too many managers make, is they dive in and start doing their people’s jobs. The motivations for this range from being well intended to malicious.

We have all seen the managers believing they are the best sales people in the world, sweeping their people aside, playing “Superseller” in important customer calls.

We see managers impatient with their people saying, “I can get this done faster….”

We see well intended managers saying, “This is new, something we’ve never done before, I can probably get it done better than the people responsible for getting it done.”

Whatever the reason or intent, doing our people’s jobs is not a sustainable strategy. It’s neither good for our people nor for the managers themselves.

When we start doing our people’s jobs, a number of things happen:

• We remove the accountability from the individual, making the manager accountable for the results.
• We remove the learning/development opportunity from the individual, as a result, the manager has to continue to do the jobs we have hired our people to do.
• We are eroding trust with our people. Taking over and doing their jobs tells them, “I don’t trust you to perform….”
• As managers, we use our own time poorly, we no longer have the time to be doing what only we can do, because we are doing the things our people should be doing.
• We may lose the creativity and different ideas that can be created by collaborating with our people on new initiatives.
• We severely limit our growth potential because we have neither the time to do those things that drive new growth, and our people aren’t developing the capabilities execute the growth strategies.
• …….and…….

What do we do about this? As leaders, we are impatient to get things done, we may have aggressive growth goals or change initiatives. We want to drive performance.

And often, we seem to be moving at a pace faster than our people can move.

So what do we do?

As trite as it is, there are two old saying that are useful to think about:

• “Sometimes, you have to slow down to go fast.”
• “Feed a person a fish, they eat for a day. Teach a person to fish, they are never hungry.”

As leaders, we are responsible for maximizing the performance and development of our people. We have to make sure our people have the skills, competencies, capabilities to do their jobs. If w hold them accountable for certain outcomes, we have to make sure they can do the jobs. There are a number of things we can do:

• Make sure they understand their jobs and what they are accountable for, set clear performance objectives.
• Provide training, support, tools to help them both develop their capabilities, and to support them in the execution of their jobs.
• Provide continued coaching and development, helping them address specific challenges they may face in doing their jobs.
• In new initiatives, leverage the collective creativity of the group, build ownership and accountability in the process.

The reality is no manager has enough time to do their own jobs. Every manager I’ve met has more demands on their time than they can possibly fulfill. We make it worse when we ignore those things, injecting ourselves into the things our people are accountable for. 

Every time we start doing our people’s jobs, we aren’t doing ours!

Afterword:  Here is the AI generated discussion of this post.  For the most part, it gives some different ideas.  There is a slightly funny part, as the struggle with the context of “Teach a person to fish.”  Enjoy!