Your staff make mistakes... let them
There’s something I keep catching myself doing as a dad.
My eldest is 12, nearly 13. She’s right in the thick of it… navigating friendships, figuring out who she is, all of it.
And every time something comes up, my “problem solver” instinct is to just give her the answer. I’ve been there. I know how it plays out.
Just do this, tell your friend that, here’s what I would do.
But that’s not what she needs from me right now.
What she needs is to go through it. To sit with the problem, find her own way through it, and come out the other side having actually learned something.
She needs me as the guide in her own journey story, not the hero.
Me jumping in and solving it doesn’t build her up. It just makes her dependent on me to solve the next one.
Same thing with my four year old. She falls over, stacks her scooter & scuffs her knees.
She gets into things she shouldn’t.
She makes a mess (mild understatement).
And as much as every instinct in me wants to prevent all of it… It’s just how she learns.
As I was finishing writing one of the final lessons for the Escape Velocity Beta program this week, it clicked.
I see the exact same pattern play out in business.
When your team makes a mistake, the worst thing you can do is hover so closely that it never happens again.
They haven’t built a capable team. They’ve built dependents who can’t think without them.
I’ve had to train myself to step back with my kids.
To let the mistake happen when the stakes are low enough.
To be there when it does… not to fix it for them, but to help them understand what went wrong and find the answer themselves.
It ain’t easy. As a dad or a business owner.
But here’s what I know after doing both for a while now.
The goal isn’t a team that never makes mistakes.
It’s a team that makes them, learns from them, and doesn’t need you to fix everything.
That’s the difference between a business that runs… and one that runs without you.
One of those gives you a job.
The other gives you your life back.
-Matthew