To some, the answer to this question of how involved should a leader be in a business minutiae is that leaders should be heavily involved with absolutely every decision that concerns a business. To others, this simply isn’t realistic. At a certain point, the business will outgrow what one person is capable of managing; this is why you hire people, after all. Over time, this goes from only hiring people to handle specific tasks to hiring managers to whom you can delegate further.
Meanwhile, the head of the business has their own share of responsibilities to take care of, and that raises the question of how much they should divide their attention with other business concerns.
What Qualifies as Minutiae?
Due to that disparity between what you might deal with on a day-to-day basis and how your team members work, you might be unsure about where your responsibilities end and theirs begin. Many team members might find it frustrating if you are consistently exerting your influence to change the course of their work, but in the broad strokes, this might be exactly what you feel falls in line with your responsibilities. However, if you’re stopping to correct team members on precisely how they go about something, that might be less welcome and less productive – they might be the experts in these particular areas, after all. At a certain point, this can lead to a greater customization of how your staff works, but that might be a discussion for further down the road.
Working Collaboratively
Being in the position that you’re in, you have the ability to completely overhaul elements of your business if they’re not working as they should be. However, these elements might only be revealed to not work once you get the right kind of intel from your relevant team members. After all, you’re not going to know that a piece of business technology is outdated or faulty without a direct report from those who use it. Employees who feel as though the business needs an update can identify the problem as well as a possible solution through something like API technology blogs, which can then be used as reference material. They can then bring the problem and their solution to you and discuss how it can help the business. That puts you in a position where you’re able to make a decision about whether to invest in it or not.
Respecting Delegation
On the other hand, when you get to a point in your business where you have hired multiple managers to oversee the operations of various branches, why not trust their judgment? After all, for you to have hired them in the first place, you must have believed in their capabilities. This is one of the tests of that – if you allow your employees to work with that trust and to develop within their roles, you might find that they begin to feel more confident, and with that confidence, they might also begin to feel more at ease in their role. This trust can create an environment that generates trust, perhaps encouraging loyalty and reducing staff turnover.
