This is my initiative for now …. I lately realized I cannot grow the business further unless I stop doing my subordinates jobs for them.

Teach them skills and hold them accountable — easy to say, difficult to do.  But that is what they say — if you want to grow, you have to learn to train, trust, and then let go.

Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?

You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”

You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours.

You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.

Sometimes we get carried away with cookie cutter solutions.  The great talent of leadership is not to know what to do, but in identifying in each of your managers and people, and knowing their strengths and weakness, know what role they play, and what actions for them to carry out to contribute to the overall mission of the organization.

What Great Managers Do

You’ve spent months coaching that employee to treat customers better, work more independently, or get organized—all to no avail.

How to make better use of your precious time? Do what great managers do: Instead of trying to change your employees, identify their unique abilities (and even their eccentricities)—then help them use those qualities to excel in their own way.

we used to say what you don’t know won’t kill you.  Maybe it will.

Knowing our blind spots may well be something that entrepreneurs and managers should increasingly become more aware of.

For Managers, Ignorance Isn’t Bliss

About two years before he died, Peter Drucker told an interviewer that among the things he regretted in the course of his long and productive career was not writing a book—it would have been his 40th—called Managing Ignorance. He added, tantalizingly, that it was bound to have been his best, but otherwise he didn’t elaborate.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about Drucker’s work-that-wasn’t, wondering what such a volume might have explored. Most likely, it seems, Drucker was interested in figuring out how those running corporations and other institutions could get their arms around what they don’t know (which, of course, tends to greatly outweigh what they do know). “As significant as the problem of organizing knowledge was,” noted John Flaherty in Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, “he considered the organization of ignorance an even more formidable challenge.”