Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Hey.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: How are you today?
[00:00:10] Speaker A: I'm awesome. I'm, as always, good to see you today. Today I want to talk about if you're. If you as the business owner are always the hero, then your business becomes the villain.
And so if you're always the one that is solving the problem and chasing the fires and saving the day, guess what? You are not the leader. You are a crutch.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Right.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: And I really want to reframe that for business owners because there are so many. So it's a syndrome called hero syndrome, and I'm here to tell you it's crushing your business.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: Killing it. So my opening question for you is why do so many business owners feel the need to be the hero?
We're going to talk a little bit about psychology today, and it's kind of interesting. So tell me your perspective on that.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: I think a lot of people are inherently subject matter experts and it's a combination. Yeah, that's fair of. They've had to show their value and they've never broken out of showing their value or they inherently don't feel comfortable that people are understanding their direction. So they have to go out and teach.
Instead of the acceptability of if it doesn't go exactly like I would do it, but it still gets done with the same result that I want, I'm okay with that. So it's a balancing. It is emotion. It's a psychological conversation with yourself that you have to prepare for because otherwise you're. You didn't buy duplication, you bought more of the job because you own the task.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Right, Right. And we just, we just got done talking about that in our last episode is what. You know, who owns what task. And so there's just this habit of a business owner to. To go in and do all of the tasks oftentimes. And so what that. What that hero syndrome looks like is that you're involved in every single decision, every single deal that happens, every fire that happens. You're involved in it, it's your business. And so you feel ownership of that. And that's understandable. But. But it gets to a point where you can't scale.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: If you're involved in everything, your team members have to check with you before they take any real action. If that's happening, you might have a little bit of hero syndrome going on and you confuse being needed with being effective.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: And it's not the same thing. And so if your business is going to fall apart when you step away, it's not a business. It's a bit of a hostage situation.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: That's a great way to put it.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Because you're micromanaging too much. Way too much.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: You see these. These reels that say, do you. Do you answer your phone while you're on vacation? If you. If you scale your business properly, you should be able to walk away and the process should continue.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: You know, because if you win the lottery tomorrow, the chances are you may not show up the same way. Coming back to work as the owner.
It is. It's yourself.
Thoughts?
Being comfortable with how do I scale this and how do we move forward?
[00:03:38] Speaker A: Well, let's talk a little bit of psychology.
So you become addicted to becoming the fixer.
There's a little bit of an addiction that happens there because it feels good to be the one that knows everything.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: That feels good. You have to admit that, and you have to come to terms with that. There's also a trust issue that happens when you micromanage or you're involved in every little thing.
You trust yourself more than you trust your team when you have to be involved in every piece of it. There's an unspoken message that you're sending to your team that I don't trust you.
I don't trust you to handle this. And how do you think, you know, what do you think that does? The morale of your employees?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Definitely pushes them out into.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: It destroys it. Yeah, it destroys it. And there's also this idea that you don't believe the systems you've put in place can replace your instinct, and that's dangerous. You put systems in place to handle certain things.
And.
Yeah, I mean, if you have this belief that none of that can replace your instinct, you might be placing your instinct in the wrong places or have.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Systems to have systems is one thing, but for trusting your systems to handle what you're trying to get for an outcome is another.
People write sops all day long, but if they don't refer back to them and update them, they're really just hanging.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: In the closet paper in a. In a binder somewhere.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: And it's not really doing anything for your business.
We said earlier, and I love this phrase, let your systems run your business and let your people run your system.
[00:05:13] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: So if you're looking for instinct, hire people with good instinct, teach them the system, and give them the oversight of the system.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: And communicating the systems is a great way to scale out. And it helps in your hiring processes, it helps in your execution, and it helps in your definition of done.
It's getting that to the end. Result.
[00:05:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
There's a real cost of always being the hero. What are some of those costs?
[00:05:47] Speaker B: That's a great question. It depends. You know, for example, if you have workers that are working two hours from.
From your home office and you have to go out and check in on the business and teach, and you're going two hours one direction, it's.
You can't recover that time or that money. Plus the ex. The fuel expense, the wear and tear in their vehicle, plus the anticipation of the guys, oh, the boss is going to come again. And there's a lot of factors that can control the outcomes.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: You stunt their growth.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: You basically stunt your team's growth, and you inadvertently, you're training your people to rely on you.
And if you don't put that in check, you as a business owner are going to burn out.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Right?
[00:06:36] Speaker A: You're absolutely going to burn out. And so does your business. So. And it goes back to. We talked about. Your hourly rate kind of drops every time you do one of those.
Somebody else's job.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Exactly. Your hourly rate is on your. Your core competencies. And if you dilute those, your rate is just going to keep reducing, reducing, reducing, because it has to come from somewhere.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Well, there's a litmus test. If your business can run without you, if you can take a vacation without taking a phone call, then you can feel confident that you're a strong leader.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: No.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Delegate the outcomes, not the task. That's different. Delegate the outcomes and not the task. And empower your team with authority, not just responsibility, to own a certain segment of your business, but give them some authority. And they've got to have some space to make mistakes. They've got to have some space to. To learn and to stumble a little bit. I used to tell my kids when we were growing up, like when I'm teaching you how to swim and you get away from me because you're having such a good time as a toddler, I told my girls, I won't allow you when you're not doing what I tell you to do because you're a little overexcited. I'm going to allow you to go beneath the surface on your own for just a second or two. I'm not going to let you drown. Okay. And no business owner should allow their business to. To drown. But sometimes you have to have the space and the margin for employees to stumble a little bit to learn from it.
Those are the best lessons, right?
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Well, it teaches you where you may have deficiencies, where you need to expand their knowledge and give them more direction.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: Which is a lot easier to do than showing up with your fire hose. Put on a fire.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
All right, so our challenge for the week is to audit your week. Um, how many tasks did you do that somebody else could own?
[00:08:29] Speaker B: That's a good one.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: That's a good one. And then just pick one, all right? You. You've come up with this list of tasks. Just pick one and completely hand it off. Outcome and everything completely handed off. And don't rescue, don't hover, all right? Just let them own it and report back to you at the end.
[00:08:46] Speaker B: And then take note of your feelings as you're making these lists to see how they feel and what drives your anxiety up and why.
And you can peel back into that to see how.
How our procedures are written, how our training's going and where. Where we may need to improve as a company, not just as an individual.
[00:09:07] Speaker A: Above all, take her cool.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Take her cool.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: It's going to be fine.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: It will all work out.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: It's all going to work out.
All right?
That's the little message of the.
