When should you step in to stop a mistake on your team?

Delegating isn’t a yes or no, right? It’s not one way or the other. There’s a real gradient that we can offload responsibilities and help people take on more and learn more within. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go.

Welcome back to the show. So last week, I was doing a talk at a conference sharing the secrets of building an unstoppable team. And this is where I dove into my six-part formula, which is what my book The Unstoppable Team is about, where when you set clear priorities, you have a good onboarding process, you have clear working norms, you understand how to track work and get that bird’s eye view, you have processes around delegating and decision making, and all this comes together and how you measure performance.

When those six things are aligned, you can have yourself an unstoppable team. And so in the talk, I shared this framework and examples around how to implement these things really, really simply on teams. And at the end of the talk, somebody had an awesome question that I wanted to do an episode about today because this is something that comes up a lot. And so the question was, when I’ve delegated something, what if I see someone’s about to make a big mistake or cost the customer’s money or create a problem with our product or whatever it is?

Should I just let them fail and learn the lesson or should I step in? And this is such a great question because we can spend all this time trying to avoid being a micromanager, really building up our skills and delegating, and there’s still times when our team members aren’t quite ready for it. And my short answer is you should absolutely step in, especially if there’s an impact to the bottom line, there’s a customer impact, there’s an impact to other team members, to longer term consequences.

We definitely want to step in. Delegating isn’t a yes or no. It’s not one way or the other. There’s a real gradient that we can offload responsibilities and help people take on more and learn more within. And so I want to be clear, really at the outset of this, that it’s not you’ve delegated it too bad. It’s already, the fate is sealed. When you’ve delegated something, that’s an opportunity for someone else to take it on. But because delegating does involve you still being aware of what’s going on and in some degree of checking in, if someone is about to make a mistake that you can first see can be prevented or that you’ve been through before and you know exactly how to fix it, flagging it is a really important part of the learning of how to take something on.

And so there’s two things that I would do in this situation. First and foremost, once you see an issue that’s either about to happen or has started to happen, approach that team member and say, hey, I know you’re running with this thing, but I was curious, like I’m kind of seeing an issue starting to come up. Like, are you aware of that? Do you sense what that is? And it’s just to get a sense of, hey, they might already know what it is and they might have a plan of how to mitigate it.

And in that case, this will alleviate any concerns and you can go back to what you were doing. Now, when you ask them this, if they say, no, what do you mean? You say, oh, well, you know, last time we placed this order with this supplier and it ended up, you know, being really late and it costs like a big delay in our project. So I just wanted to flag that, right? So maybe you share then what the risk is.

And if the person’s like, oh, okay. Yes. Okay. I got it. Let me run with it again. Now you’ve planted that seed. You, you, you know, help them course correct. And then you can go back to your business. But a lot of the times we recognize something and the team member does need a little bit extra support. And so you say, hey, you know, um, wanted to just flag that using the supplier can cause some delays.

And they say, oh, well, I don’t know what to do. Like what other suppliers do we have? And then they get nervous and they need some support again. This is not a sink or swim moment where you go, well, it’s your project. You have to figure it out. This is where I would invite the person to shadow us and learn from us how we would solve that problem. And this is where you’re teaching them how to fish so that they can take on this project or process or task next time.

So in that case, I would say something like, all right, well, you know, we have a really tight timeline. So let me kind of take the reins on this, but I want to walk you through exactly what I do step-by-step so that next time this comes up, you’ve totally got it. Is that okay with you? And so you are volunteering your support and you’re asking if that’s okay. So the person doesn’t think like you don’t trust them or, you know, you you’re, you’re taking it back and, and, and it’s not their project anymore.

So you’re really just demonstrating, hey, I want to help you be successful. There’s a few things that I, you know, learnings I can impart on you. And then from there, you’ve got this. Did you know that I do team workshops on all of the stuff that I talk about on this show with large companies like Google and also with startups and small businesses like marketing agencies, law firms, and med spas, whether it’s making those feedback conversations a little less awkward, how to support your team through all of the change and uncertainty, making us all well, a little on edge right now, or delegating to empower your team to step up as owners.

I come into your teams and give you the tools you need to wrestle with all this tough stuff and feel like you’ve got it handled. Reach out at helloatleahgarvin.com or pass my info along to the decision maker in your company. And let’s make all this team stuff easier and a lot more fun. Okay. So that’s the framing. And then the second thing I would say is actually, you know, having them shadow you, talking through the reasoning behind things, letting them really understand and learn how to solve this for the next time.

I think when we jump back into a project, it can be easy to say, okay, I’ve got it from here. Go work on this. There’s another real high priority thing. You know, I’ll take this over and I’ll let you know when it’s done. But when we do that, now that person’s going to just make that same mistake again. We haven’t taught them anything about how to take it on in the future. So it is important. And you might, you know, take, you know, it might mean two of you doubling up on this task or project for a short period of time so that you can train that person on how to take that on.

But again, any amount of time of them shadowing you and learning this thing is time saved in the future. So it is worth it. And I say this about teaching our team members anything about building a relationship, about really getting clear on expectations, about mapping out, you know, how you approach a certain task, writing up a process or recording a loom video. All of these things take a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Okay. And a lot of times I hear people just like you saying, I just don’t have time.

I’m so buried. I’m drowning so much. I don’t even have time to do that. And I got to say, nothing takes more time than having to redo a bunch of work because it didn’t get done right. Having to go back to an earlier point and look at, well, where did stuff go wrong? And you’re like unwinding decisions that didn’t work. You have delayed projects because people didn’t have clear expectations and guidance set. You’re having to jump in and jump off your high profile work and your high, you know, high, high priority stuff because something went wrong here.

And now you’re pulled in anyway. Okay. So the more we figure this out upfront or the more, when we jump in, we explain exactly what we’re doing for a team member to be able to figure that out later, the more set up we are in the future. And again, this kind of thing I’m talking about, this takes a few hours at most, usually much less. So for example, if you, if you’re jumping in and you’re helping someone, you know, figure out how to complete a project and really get through something, you know, you figure out, well, what are those key meetings that you need to be having with that team member?

What are some of the things like, you know, communications that you’re sending out or whatever you’re doing to fix it and get it back on track. That’s the lesson you’ve got to impart on that person so that they can do that next time. And as you’re doing this, I encourage you not just to tell them, but write it out in an email, write the steps. This is going to be the lightweight, simple SOP or process for them to be able to do it next time.

You know, it’s probably as simple as having a checklist in many cases, right? Okay. Here’s we run through, here’s the way that we figure this out. Here’s the vendors or suppliers or contractors we use. Here’s the template, right? Just kind of getting it aggregated. So the person can really run with it later. And now doing that upfront, that’s going to save that person time on the other end. So this is really an upfront investment. Again, just a few hours, right?

At most to be able to get things humming along later. So this is what we do when we’re in a situation where we’ve delegated something, we recognize a risk that something’s going off track. And instead of just going, well, sink or swim or taking it over ourselves, we jump in. We first assess like, Hey, with a little bit of guidance, does the person understand what the risk or issue is? And can they take it over? And if not, that we have, we give them an opportunity to shadow us and learn from how we would solve it so that they can do it the next time.

All right. So delegating is something I think that’s a real challenge for a lot of us. I hear it every single day from my clients and in folks that I work with, um, both in the corporate world and small business owners, because it’s hard to know where to let go. And I would say the real, you know, the real question to ask ourselves that helps us really ground and well, what should I do here? What should I not is how can I set someone up for success for the next time?

When we ask ourself that question, then we figure out, okay, the next time I’m not going to be involved. And here would be the things that they’d have to know to be successful. All right. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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