What does this have to do with leadership?
I loved Mike Michaolwicz’s book, Clockwork. One of my takeaways from his book was to plan a vacation and force myself to put systems in place that could tolerate leaving my business behind and being totally disconnected. I spent about 10 minutes on my trip thinking about work. And honestly, that is just because one of my employees got really sick and felt the need to check in with me to see if she could work from home. Of course she could! I had a backup plan already in place for it and she knew it, but felt bad and wanted to make sure. I gave her the go-ahead (which she didn’t need from me) and told her to get well, then got on an air boat and pet a baby alligator.
Reasons why I didn’t have to think about work
My team has systems and procedures and they have been well trained in them
We have a culture of trust and autonomy. My team knows when they should call me and they know me well enough to know that, if they call me about something that one of them can handle, I will just tell them that I trust them to find a way. Every time that they call me it is an opportunity for me to prove that I really mean it when I say I don’t want all the power and I hate micromanaging people.
We have redundancies. If something or someone can’t do their job, then they know who can.