Strong Teams Don’t Need to Be Rescued

Hero leadership attracts teams that need rescuing

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:55Bill Gallagher: What if your team didn't need rescuing? What if you had the kind of team that didn't need rescuing, that was competent? What if your business was smooth and self-running with a team that was fantastic and confident and capable? Well, that would require you giving up being the hero all the time. I don't know about you, but a lot of us have done that. I certainly have done it. I love being the hero. I've dealt with real life and death emergencies and business emergencies on the radio, and I love being heroic. I love saving the day. I love feeling like I did that. But that actually, if you develop that kind of a pattern, that makes you into the kind of a leader who attracts and retains a team that needs rescuing all the time. It teaches your team and your people that they need rescuing. And that's not so helpful. That's not so healthy. We want to get in a position where your team is not like that.

Let go to grow bigger

01:49Bill Gallagher: One of my clients ran a business some years ago before I met him, and he ran his business, and he was involved in every decision. He was engaged in everything all the time, and it created exactly that kind of a team. He was the hero. He was the decider, and his team needed rescuing. His team needed help all the time. That whole business only ever got to $7 million, didn't have a huge exit. And it's a fine little business, but always, always limited.

02:20Bill Gallagher: After stepping away and stepping back and considering himself in his life, he started a new business. But this time, he started and practiced letting go to grow up. Let go to go bigger. Let go became his mantra. Now with the new business, he's not involved. He doesn't rescue everything. He pushes people. He empowers people. He coaches his team, and he trusts them. If they're not the right person to solve problems, he hires a different person. He replaces them with someone else and finds someone who is able and willing to step up. He's resisted being the hero who saves the day every time and created a team that doesn't require saving.

03:05Bill Gallagher: So what's that going to take? Well, there's two parts to it. One is you have to change your way of behaving. If you love being the hero and are the hero again and again, you will surround yourself. You will build people that don't step up. Now there's nothing inherently wrong with people, but they just learn in that situation around you. They're going to let you save the day on the regular. They're going to know that you've come in to rescue. So you have to pull back from that. You have to retrain them and you to operate differently, and you have to start to build in systems. So a regular set of execution habits, smooth processes, a great team. If you have somebody that is completely incapable of stepping up, who always needs rescuing, you need to replace that person. You need to wish them well and send them on their way in life and get in somebody else who can do the job, who's willing to step up. So you have to deal with both sides of it. You have to hire the right kind of people or invite them to step up and see if they step up. And then you have to deal with your tendency to be the hero all the time, and you have to put in systems and procedures and execution habits that allow the team to thrive, to measure up.

04:09Bill Gallagher: That's where the magic happens. When you could stop being the hero all the time, when you could encourage your team, be proud of the team operating smoothly. What if we got used to a low drama business? What if we got used to things just going well, making money, pricing right, executing well, not tolerating weird drama from people on the team, suppliers, customers? Let's cut out the drama. Let's bring predictability. Let's bring in process improvement, and let's stop solving every problem with your personal energy.

The mirror comes first

04:43Bill Gallagher: All that personal energy that you throw into the business to solving problems, to pulling things up, hustling, leaning in, grinding. That doesn't actually build a great, valuable, profitable business. That builds a business that needs you 24/7. A business that needs you 24/7 isn't a very saleable business. It's not a strong business. It's not a strong team. A business that needs you round the clock, that needs you day in and day out to be a hero, to save the day, that's not a great strong business.

05:14Bill Gallagher: So the question to ask yourself is who are you being? What are your ways of operating, your patterns of comfort? Where are you leaning into that, and how are your people being? So you've got to pull back first. First, you have to deal with the one in the mirror, and then you have to start to encourage your people to step up, and you have to build together systems, processes, practices that operate well as a team. When you have those three things running together well, now we start to have an interesting team that doesn't require you to be heroic, a team that stands on its own, a team that operates well. That's a powerful team. That's where we have some real traction as a business. That increases the value of the business significantly.

05:56Bill Gallagher: So what do you do with you then? What do you do? Well, look, you could work on your golf game. You could get more strategic. You could focus on the big growth opportunities. You could start to think about acquisition strategies. You could start to think about the exit. You could start to think about where to invest in the business. There's a lot of things that you might think about and work on if you weren't busy solving every drama, being the hero at every moment. There are a lot of interesting things you could do with the business if you could step out of that pattern, if you could get the team to stand up. So pull back yourself, encourage the team to stand up. Together, build systems, practices, execution habits that make a difference, that operate the team well, and that will make the real difference in the business.

06:42Bill Gallagher: So those are really the practices to put in, and you have to deal with who you are that always has to jump in, who you are that needs to be the hero all the time, who you are that holds the team down. I've seen this again and again. I had a guy come to me years ago, early when I started as a full-time coach. And he's like, listen, my team's passive, they're late on things, and I'd love to make this a Scaling Up company. So we went to work on things. And then we started to see almost right away that his way of operating was to start and end every meeting, to build all the agendas, to put his ideas and his thinking into everything. And to do it on his terms. But that also meant that his team learned that the meeting starts whenever he shows up. That means that they need to listen first for what he cares about, what he's focused on. The team was inherently passive because of the way he behaved, and he wasn't shifting his behavior.

Three elements of a self-running team

07:38Bill Gallagher: So you've got to shift your behavior as you put in practices like quarterly planning, annual strategy, a good meeting cadence, dashboards, things like that. You have to shift your patterns of operating, of always needing to be the hero, of needing to rescue things, of needing to weigh in on every decision. You have to pull that back. You also have to encourage the team to stand up, and the people that don't stand up, that don't step into the thing, you have to—if it's not making any progress, you have to let those people go gracefully, nicely, and then replace them with somebody who's hungry to step up, who's hungry to show you what they've got, what they're capable of, who wants to grow more and to step into more things. And then that will naturally lead to a better running team, better processes, that kind of thing.

08:27Bill Gallagher: So you step back, start to develop the team, implement a great meeting cadence that you aren't running, have some dashboards and scorecards, simple ones that let you know things are running okay as a team. Now the team's operating well together. You could start to be more strategic. You could step back into things. It's a very simple framework, but it's not so easy to deal with our own personal behaviors. It's not so easy to look in the mirror and say, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe it starts with me and the way I've always behaved since I was a little kid.

A leader who started every meeting kept his team passive

09:05Bill Gallagher: If you start to deal with that and you start to address the way that you've been forever and aren't limited by it, but are allowed to level up, to shift, to grow into new kinds of leadership, you'll find new problems to work on. It never gets old. There's always another problem. There's always another thing to deal with as a leader. So we want to start to move into that and not be stuck with the same patterns, the same behaviors. You stay with the same patterns, you'll end up with the same team, the same kinds of results, a little bit more, a little further down the road, but a lot of the sameness all the time persists because we don't level up ourselves.

09:37Bill Gallagher: If we come into a team or you on your own implement all the Scaling Up things, but you don't deal with yourself and your normal ways of operating, thinking, behaving, you don't get clear, you don't bring more self-awareness to your role as a leader, then you'll just keep doing the same things forever. Another version. A little bit more of the same down the road. And that's the thing that we deal with again and again. We have great execution habits. They're not rocket science, but they're really hard to do if you don't change your own behavior. They don't make the same difference. They make some difference. They're worth doing, but the fullness of the opportunity to level up the business is thwarted. Violence is done to that. That effort, that sincere effort to grow your business if you don't also deal with yourself, deal with the person in the mirror and your tendency to muck it up, to be the lid on it, to have to get involved in everything, to have to be the hero.

Self-awareness unlocks execution habits

10:31Bill Gallagher: Let's create a self-running team, powerful kind of thing, and that is not going to start with them showing up. It's going to start with you stepping back a little bit more every day, a little bit more building up the people, the systems, the processes, the dashboards, the plans, those kinds of things a little bit every day, pulling back with a lot of self-awareness, compassion for yourself, and for them. Hope that's helpful. I help you scale your company with more ease, with more play, and you have a better life in the process. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.

11:11Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.