As a result of helping you to avoid micro-managing, your systems give your employees more responsibility in their work. This is a huge part of your job as the head of your management team: getting your employees to take ownership and be engaged. Keep this in mind as you develop your systems, because you’re going to have to trust that your employees can do the work you need from them.
It can be difficult to loosen you grip, especially when you’re running a business you’re passionate about. It’s natural to want everything to go perfectly, and to think that if you don’t do something, then it won’t be done correctly, exactly as you want it. However, this is exactly the kind of mentality that will run you into the ground and lead to a complete burn out. It ends up being extremely destructive to your business.
As a business owner, you probably spent a lot of time hiring those initial employees to help you get your business started. That means these are people in which you have confidence. You looked for employees with skills you admired and that your business would really benefit from. If that was the case, you hired people who could get things done and could be trusted with a lot of responsibility. Unfortunately, if they continue to work without challenges, without responsibility, they will likely disengage.
If you aren’t running systems that immerse your employees in the goals of your company, most likely they’re wishing you would. When you get your people engaged in their work and your work, you begin to share goals. Putting your employees in charge where you can and giving them more responsibility will get them much more emotionally and creatively involved in their work. If they see it as their responsibility to be sure something gets done in the best way possible, if they can see how they fit into the overall way your business is run and feel like a significant part of the team, they will perceive themselves to be meaningful components of your business, as they should.
Your employees will see that if they do their work well, and if they can figure out how to do things even better than maybe what you ask of them, they can better the business. And bettering the business has personal meaning, because it betters the people who made those improvements happen. It’s a source of pride.