Before we jump in:
I am currently rebuilding my sales and customer service teams in South Africa. Amazing english and better close percentages.
I recently hired Amy and she is crushing it. She makes $18k / yr.
Here are four more I interviewed if you’d like to hire one:
Respond to this email if you’d like an intro.
(Note, alongside being a happy customer, I am also an investor in the business)
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When you are an entrepreneur, employees come to you with problems and questions non-stop. How you handle them is what separates the good managers from the poor managers and the effective delegators from the ineffective delegators.
Option number 1 is to take over and solve the problem yourself.
This is the easiest way to handle things in the short run. You are the boss, and you are better at solving problems, especially ones related to the business you started. You know what to do and how to do it, and, let’s face it, just doing it is much easier than teaching someone in the moment.
Option number 2 is to do the work to teach your employee how to solve the problem themselves.
This is the path of most resistance, but it is also key for your long term success. You could just let the employee off easy and enable their lack of critical thinking OR you can challenge them to think (and get a window into how they think).
Even though this wasn’t always the case, when an employee comes to me now with a question, any question, I ALWAYS ask them the same exact question in reply.
Well, what would you do and why?
I’ll ask leading question after leading question.
What is the goal here? What are the downsides? What are the upsides?
This is the process of teaching your employees how to think for themselves and putting the problem back on them to critically think about the solution without you. It creates a teaching moment in which they are forced to exercise their ability to make decisions.
I call this the “monkey on the back” conundrum.
When an employee comes to a boss (or you) with a problem, that problem is a giant monkey on their back. As soon as they ask the question and pose the problem to you, the monkey jumps off of their back and onto your desk. It is now your problem. That monkey is yours to look after.
You can either send the employee on their way, keep their monkey, and solve their problem. Or you can make sure they walk out of your office with their monkey and a plan to take care of it themselves.
If you take the easy route, which is to keep the monkey and take care of it yourself, you breed an environment within your company where none of your employees know how to care for their own monkeys, and they ALWAYS show up on your desk.
Every single problem ends up on YOU. You will not only always be stressed out, but you’ll also end up being the bottleneck inside your business. There will be monkeys lined up outside your door. The hallway outside your office will be like a backed up pipe full of monkeys. Business won’t be able to continue. Decisions won’t get made. Things will be slow. And you will be living a life of hell.
BUT if you get your employees used to taking care of their own monkeys, two things will happen:
- The employees will get better at taking care of monkeys
Decision making is a muscle. This exercise allows your employees practice, or exercise, making decisions. They improve. They get better. Eventually they’ll solve problems without coming into your office at all. Your phone will stop ringing. They’ll start preventing the problems in the first place. They’ll understand the goals of the company and will be good at making their own decisions.
2. You’ll learn which employees are great at making decisions
I generally promote from within because I know how all of my employees think. They ask me questions and bring me their monkeys, and I get a look right into their brains as they solve the problems. While I’m asking leading questions, I’m also figuring out how they think.
The sad truth is that most humans aren’t nearly as competent at making decisions as you’d like to believe. It’s why the average American has a $800 car payment but lives paycheck to paycheck. The brain power isn’t there.
This process is valuable on so many levels. You learn which employees need to be fired and which ones just don’t think about things the right way. You’ll learn which ones should NOT be put in decision making roles and what their weaknesses are.
But something miraculous will also happen. About 20% of people will show you that they really think about things the right way. They’ll make good decision after good decision, and when you talk through things with them, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how their minds work.
These folks can then be tasked with making decisions FOR YOU. They can be promoted into management roles so the decisions and monkeys then come to them.
And after years and years of this you’ll end up with other people who can take care of monkeys and you’ll have a business that makes you money without your involvement.
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A few tweets from this week:
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Note: Alongside being a happy customer, I am also an investor in the business.
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber