You set the how and you are in the work. Your team gets detailed briefs, sees you in the working sessions, and knows that what goes out has been through your hands. The output is good. Clients and senior stakeholders trust it, and they are right to.
Here is what it costs. Nothing your team produces is fully theirs. They can follow a brief and they are slow to write one, because they have never had to. When you are away, the work continues and the standard drops, and everyone including you reads that as proof you were needed. It is proof of the opposite. It is proof that the standard lives in your head instead of in the team.
Foreman is the style leaders tend to fall into when they were the best individual contributor before they were promoted, and the one most likely to produce a burned out manager and a quietly bored team.
Look at your two highest bars. If Standards is highest, the redoing is the habit to break first: it costs you evenings and teaches your team that a first draft is enough because you will fix it. If Direction is highest, the brief is the habit: you are describing the how because you are afraid of the wrong thing coming back, and the wrong thing coming back once is how people learn.
Here is how I explain the seventy percent rule to someone who was the best operator on the team. If a person can do the work seventy percent as well as you, it is theirs, from that day. Their way at seventy percent beats your way at full speed, because your way only exists when you are in the room.
The missing thirty percent is not a quality problem. It is the price of a team that can run without you. Some of it closes on its own once the work is theirs and nobody is waiting for your edits. Hand over the outcome, the deadline and what good looks like. Leave the route to them.
One change for this week. Pick one piece of work you would normally review and change. Write the standard down in five lines instead. Hand the lines and the work to the person, and do not look at it before it goes out. Then look at what came back and decide whether the five lines were wrong or the fear was.
Next step: the Delegation diagnostic tells you which of the four delegation red flags you are showing.
Next step
The other results
- GatekeeperYou hold the calls and you are not in the room.
- PartnerYou are in the work and you do not hold the pen.
- SponsorYou set outcomes and step back.
About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Management Style Quiz, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.