If you’re reading this, then I’m probably still alive.

I’m writing this essay from the lobby of an urgent care facility to get some help with a minor medical malady. 

I hadn’t planned on spending my morning here, but here is where I am. 

I expect you’ve been in a similar situation.

A morning like this is usually the moment when you realize one of two things:

1. My team is actually quite capable of working effectively without my direct oversight or input.
2. My team is mostly dependent on me.

And if you realize #2 is true, a morning like this is far too late to fix it.

My advice is to start fixing it now.

• Are you the bottleneck for decisions that your team should be able to make? 
• Are you investing in training to ensure your team knows what they need to know to reduce their reliance on you?
• Are you documenting processes and procedures so your people have access to a library of answers?
• Are you actively delegating work so that your people have a chance to get real-world experience before you’re unexpectedly unavailable.

I know that losing half a day waiting at the doctor is unlikely to fundamentally destroy your team goals, but what if half a day turned into a week? Or a month? What happens then?

Expect the unexpected. Prepare your team to win without you. Prepare them to win without one another. 

You can’t prepare for every eventuality, but you should have an idea of how things would work should anyone on your team be sidelined.

The moment you lose someone isn’t the moment you want to be thinking about how to navigate their absence. 

Start today.

TRY THIS: The single simplest place to start is to simply create a shared document where you start answering the questions people pose to you. When someone asks about X, you take an extra 5 minutes to document the answer in the shared document.

While you are working on reducing the places in which you are the bottleneck, training people to upgrade (and cross train) their skills, and delegating more than you ever have before…just start dropping intel into the shared document. 

Don’t try to capture it all today, that’s way too much, just capture whatever comes up. Where possible delegate input to others who are domain experts. In time you will have a robust library of shared, searchable information because you started today.

My free PDF, “The 5 Secrets of Impossibly Effective Teams,” will show you the simple leadership moves that help teams unlock their full potential and deliver outsized results, without burning out. Grab your copy now at geoffwelch.com/secrets