Strategic Coach Resources

How your Free Days™ can have a tremendous impact on your team’s confidence.

When you’re always around, it becomes habitual for team members to ask for your opinion or approval before moving ahead, even on issues where it would be okay if they didn’t. When you take Free Days, you create a situation where they have to act in your absence, developing and relying on their own capabilities and knowledge of your business. This can be a great confidence booster for team members and for you when you realize what your team is capable of handling without you.

However, you don’t have to go away to begin the process of increasing your team’s confidence. In fact, there are some things you can do while you’re in the office that will help support team members’ confidence in making decisions and taking action when you’re away. Here are a couple of suggestions for how to support your team:

Believe in progress, not perfection.

One of the most important things you can do to support your team’s learning efforts is to allow them to make mistakes and encourage them to see these as learning opportunities rather than failures. As Dan Sullivan often says, “The problem with failure is that it’s wasted on most people.” If you adopt the attitude of “progress not perfection,” it allows everyone on your team to take risks in the process of growing their capabilities. Often, these risks will pay off immediately. When they don’t, they become the source of valuable lessons when you ask, “What didn’t work in this situation?” The answers will lead to insights on how things can be done better in the future. Your team will feel much more comfortable making decisions on their own if they know that a few honest mistakes made in the process of consistent improvement are not the end of the world.

If you adopt the attitude of “progress not perfection,” it allows everyone on your team to take risks in the process of growing their capabilities.

Avoid “drive-by delegations.”

Shannon Waller, creator of our Team Programs, coined the term “drive-by delegation” to describe what happens when someone drops a project in someone else’s lap without adequate communication about the details or expected results. The more clearly you can explain what you would like to see happen with the project you’re delegating, the more confident the team member you’re delegating to will be about being able to meet your expectations. This doesn’t mean telling them how to get the result. Talented team members can figure that part out, as long as you tell them what they’re aiming for and provide any pieces of wisdom that are vital to achieving that successful outcome. For your most important delegations, you’ll want to adequately communicate so the person you’re delegating to understands your thinking and judgement criteria. That way, they’ll have the right tools to act confidently in your absence. If you use the “tell and show” technique in the article on page 5, you’ll also have confidence, which will give you the peace of mind to leave things up to them while you’re away.