Don’t Manage Your People.

People don’t need management.

Processes, systems and technology need managing. Not humans.

People want you to lead them, not to manage them.

The paradox of management is that the goal should be to do less of it.

Rather than building a team of people reliant on your ability to manage them, wouldn’t it be far better to build a team of leaders?

Continuously managing people is hard and no one really benefits from it. Your people become reliant on you when things get hard and they defer ownership to you. It’s a source of leakage on your energy and you become the bottleneck. Additionally, this doesn’t provide many opportunities for growth.

Show your people leadership by giving them responsibility and ownership over their jobs. This builds trust and enables them to grow into leaders themselves.

There’s a time and a place for management. But the default should be leadership.