Superheroitis is the belief that the only way to get something done right is to do it yourself.
It can really get in the way of your business’s growth if you don’t fix it. When you constantly step in to take care of things, your team won’t feel valued and they won’t try as hard. Your best people will leave and the biggest slackers will stay, leading to lower productivity and profits. It also becomes a never-ending demand on your time.
Here’s my 3-step cure to overcoming this limiting belief:
- Change your mindset. Maybe it is true that you can do it better. So what? That doesn’t matter. You have to decide that it’s ok to let your team do it and give them a chance to learn and take ownership. You have to invest in training your team, but that investment will pay off big time. Repeat to yourself: “I’m not the only one who can do this.”
- Systemize the routine and humanize the exceptions. Usually about 80-90% of processes are routine situations that you can put down on paper and teach. Then there’s that 10-20% of situations that are exceptions, that are too unpredictable to systemize. These exceptions are where you may be tempted to step in and play superhero. Teach your team the routines, but also teach them how to recognize and handle the exceptions.
- Train, Measure, Repeat. Break the training up into manageable steps. If you overwhelm your trainees with too much at once, they won’t be able to master the processes and it will reinforce your belief that only you can do it. Outline what steps you want them to learn by when, and what results you’re looking for – when they understand what the objectives are, they’ll learn faster and have better recall. Then measure the outcomes so you can see how they’re doing. Once they’ve mastered the first steps, you can then repeat the process with the next steps.
If you’re ready to cure your superheroitis, free up your time, and create a more productive and profitable team, schedule a call and we can work on some strategies together.
Author: Mark McNulty, Business Coach in Louisville, KY