As a leader, there are times you feel compelled to do everything right?

As a leader, there are times you feel compelled to do everything right?

Remember that guilty feeling that you have when you would think of asking another staff member to do something, you might be thinking “ Oh no I couldn’t ask them to do that”, that is actually just causing more detriment to yourself.

Reasons that you want to do things yourself can be;

• You are quicker at completing the task
• You get frustrated if it is not done a certain way
• You feel guilty asking people for help
• You like to control everything
• You don’t know how to ask for help
• You feel obligated 
• You know that it won’t be done properly, so you may as well do it yourself in the first place….

Do any of this point strike a chord with you? Have you been guilty of thinking on or all of them at some time?

Don’t worry, I sure have. When I started as a Nominated Supervisor, I FELT that is was my responsibility to do all the tasks, and guess what started to happen….. I started to burn out. How did I know… well, I experienced the symptoms;

• Tired
• Short-tempered
• No ability to be mindful
• Losing my temper
• Not using my active listening skills
• Pretending I was busy so I wouldn’t have to talk to people

UH-OH! What was happening! I was becoming the person I didn’t want to be… so I engaged in some serious reflecting, and I decided to delegate. 

That was such a great decision, in my frenzy to do everything, I had noticed that I had started to make my team feel incompetent at their jobs!  Wow, that was never my intention, but looked what happened when I got caught up in ‘doing it all’. I implemented changes immediately. I had a conversation with my team about what they wanted to do. Here I was thinking I had to do it all, when in hindsight I was the one who was not making any progress happen.

Do it, delegate! Have a conversation with your team, and take the burden off yourself.