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Friends & Friction: If you sink into the minutiae, you’ll miss the boat

Your real job is to work yourself out of a job because, if you’re not moving forward, you’re actually reversing. There is no middle ground for still waters. They eventually get flushed out.

When you are young, you can wake up at the crack of dawn and work superhuman hours, but, as you get older, your commitments multiply and sometimes compete, while your energy levels decrease.

We see it in sports, where stars fall all the time, but are simply replaced by new ones.

It happens the same way in the corporate world. Younger, sharper people enter the workforce every year.

While some senior employees retire, many are retrenched along the way.

Life, by definition, is a wonderful race, but the finish line is death.

Recently, I had breakfast at a popular restaurant.

The food took quite a long time to come out of the kitchen, so I went to look for the manager.

I found her frying the eggs herself while the rest of her staff members were talking.

The cook was relating a story about the previous night and the woman who escaped his clutches.

If you’re a manager and you have to roll up your sleeves, you must know that your career is dead.

It means you either do not have the right number of people working for you, or their attitude is wrong – either way, it means you are bad at managing resources.

Rolling up your sleeves like that can also be a symptom of a deeper problem – that you lack self-confidence; that you are unable to give your subordinates clear instructions; that you cannot hold them accountable; and that there are no consequences to disrespecting you.

Jesse Sostrin, the author of The Manager’s Dilemma, talks about the “leadership paradox”.

A leader has to be more essential and less involved at the same time.

The manager who fried the eggs herself was busy with something she shouldn’t have been doing and therefore couldn’t undertake her primary function of running the whole restaurant.

If anything, she had descended to the level of her direct reports, which is a grave mistake.

There can be many staff members, but there can only be one boss at the store – just as there can be many musicians in an orchestra, but only one conductor, whose job is to coordinate the performance and make the audience’s experience memorable.

When the deadlines are screaming and the profits are crashing, the temptation to do everything yourself increases, but falling into this trap is dangerous, not only for your team members and yourself, but for the long-term survival of your career.

Your job is to shape and sharpen the thinking of your team members, and to provide them with the resources they need to do their best. You must give them an opportunity to work under intense pressure because that is how growth comes about.

The difference between being less involved and being absent is fatal.

Businesses or divisions that suffer from absentee managers fail dismally, but, in businesses where the manager is essential, she is always around to coach her staff, to give them support and demand that they are accountable.

An often overlooked management function is that of managing upwards, which is making sure that executive managers know what the division is about, and making sure that it is seen to be essential to the success of the business. That function cannot be delegated.

Sadly, when the manager is bogged down with the minutiae, the business will be neglected and, when the inevitable winter of consolidation arrives, the division will be shut down.

But if your job is done well, you’ll be the one called up to the executive suite to handle bigger challenges.

Kuzwayo is the founder of Ignitive, an advertising agency

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