How To Lead Staff—While Keeping the Lights On

You’ve done the hard part building a successful agency. But production has plateaued.

To spark improvement, you focus on growth and spend less time in the office—which prevents you from overseeing your staff. As a result, you’re constantly worrying about what’s happening back on site.

It’s the biggest challenge every agency owner faces: How do I drive growth and also lead my organization effectively?

Well-run companies don’t depend on one individual. They institutionalize employee development by enabling knowledge transfer among the existing work force. At many organizations, managers are required to develop their replacement and can’t earn a promotion until their designated successor is deemed to be ready.

In other words, part of your job is to make yourself redundant. Analyze what you do daily. Ask yourself what part of your daily tasks you could transition to someone else in the agency. Then spend the time training your staff to assume your additional tasks. This will free you up to focus on the most important business issues affecting the agency.

Here are three steps to help you find the right balance:

1. Focus on what you do well. You can’t do everything—so don’t. Instead, focus on tasks that add the most value.
2. When first assuming a management role, most people want to make all the decisions. It’s a management style called “command and control.” But in today’s flat organizations, it doesn’t work. The business world moves too quickly for employees to wait to be told what to do. Successful organizations hire the right people, dividing up roles and responsibilities to maximize each individual employee’s contribution. And that applies to the agency owner, as well. You need to identify what you do best and focus on that task.
3. Empower your employees to act. It’s your job as the organization’s leader to create an atmosphere that fosters taking initiative over taking orders. Make sure your employees understand that you will stand by their decisions. Don’t be quick to correct the way they are doing something if the method they use solves the problem.

The more you micro-manage, the more you send the message to an employee that you don’t expect him or her to make a decision. Move responsibility down to the lowest level in your organization. Your front-line employees know what’s going on, so give them the power to solve the problems facing the agency and get out of the way.

Be patient. It’s natural to try to solve a problem or issue you see at the office, but hold back. Wait. Allow your staff to figure out the solution. It’s not easy—especially when you watch someone make a mistake. But over time, what you will discover is that an employee will own a specific task for which he or she feels responsible.

Brian S. Cohen is president and CEO of Strategic Growth Advisors LLC, a Los Angeles advisory firm focused on helping independent agencies and carriers accelerate their growth and improve their bottom line.