Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club
This week I had a call with the 2 owners of a young but growing small professional services firm.
In it, we discussed the thorny issue of a young team that is seemingly stuck. You look at your team and feel like you are:
"punching below our weight".
You know they could be doing more, and you desperately need them to be doing more, but instead, you’ve become their ultimate security blanket. Every problem, every tricky bit of work, ends up back on your desk. This traps you in the day-to-day grind of client work, leaving no time to focus on working ON the business.
In fact, I had another call today on this same problem. It may not always be that your team is junior. But it is so easy to slip into the situation where you have trained your team in Learned Helplessness. I.e., you are the helpful one, who sorts out their issue for them when asked. They just need to delegate it upwards.
The solution is not just about telling your team to ‘do more’ or to get angry with them. It’s about changing the systems and habits that created the dependency in the first place. You need to shift your role from being the answer to every question to being the coach who helps the team find the answers themselves.
This is what the rest of this article explores.
Diagnose the real problem: is it ‘can’t do’ or ‘won’t do’?
Before you can fix anything, you need to understand the root cause.
There is a critical difference between team members who can’t do the work and those who won’t.
A ‘won’t do’ issue is about attitude and requires performance management.
A ‘can’t do’ issue, however, is about a competence or confidence gap. This is often the real problem in a small, growing firm. You might see team members who gravitate towards the easy jobs because it feels safer. They spend too long on simple tasks and avoid the complicated work, knowing that you are there to pick it up. After all your team will be experts in making the work fit the time available.
When you have a ‘can’t do’ issue, this is a training and systems issue, not a disciplinary one.
Create psychological safety (but don’t be the hero)
Team members will never take risks or stretch themselves if they are afraid of making mistakes. Your first job, as a leader and manager of your team is to build psychological safety, making it clear that it is okay to try and fail.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It is a climate in which people feel comfortable expressing themselves and speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation. This concept, largely pioneered by Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson, has become a cornerstone of high-performing teams and healthy workplace cultures.
At its core, psychological safety is not about being nice or avoiding conflict. Instead, it is about creating an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust where individuals feel secure enough to be vulnerable in front of their peers. This allows for the open exchange of ideas and a collective commitment to learning and improvement.
How to maintain psychological safety when there is a “can’t do” issue
Often team members are afraid of making a mistake. As a result they may want to regularly get your blessing for ‘what to do next’. It’s important that your team know how you are likely to react in the event of them making a mistake.
For example, you can tell your team that:
“You will never get angry with them for making a mistake. You will only get frustrated if they try to cover it up, or if they make the same mistake twice without learning from it.”
As their manager you need to visibly show them you have their back; if there is a problem with a client, your name is on the door and you will take it on the chin.
This approach allows you to "go hard on the problem, not the person". Now, of course, if this mistakes keeps on happening and they are not learning from the training and process you have helped them set up then you have moved from a ‘can’t’ situation to a ‘wouldn’t’ situation, i.e. you are now in a performance management situation.
Delegate carefully
Are you delegating enough of the right type of work down to your team? Or are you hanging onto the stuff that you like?
In my experience we often delegate ineffectively, for example:
An incomplete brief
Lack of deadlines
No checkpoints
No checking to ensure the team member that we have delegated to has willingly taken the task on
Your team may see the task coming their way. But unless you get an affirmative answer that they will do it and can do it, you will often find that they will go quiet. Basically hoping that you will forget about the importance of the task you have delegated.
This means that on your to do list every day is to decide what to delegate that day and also follow up what you have delegated out. Or as I talk about it in this article, how to systematically delegate. (Scroll down to over halfway)
Change your systems to build competence and accountability
Good intentions are not enough. You need to change the processes that enable dependency and instead build systems that foster autonomy and accountability.
Codify ‘how to do something’ in your workflow management system
Your team, typically, don’t have your level of expertise and experience. So the stuff you know backwards they either don’t know or they are still learning. You can not expect them to be a mind reader on how you want things done. But you can expect them to follow the process that you have put in your firm’s practice management system.
Your practice management system needs to break up your standard workflows into repeatable tasks and steps. For example, can you add a check list for your team to check before they move onto the next step?
Tip: For common tasks or recurring problems that your team struggles with, record short explanation videos. You can build up a simple video library and link the relevant videos directly to tasks in your workflow software. You can then make it a rule: before anyone asks for help on a task, they must confirm they have already watched the linked video.
Stop the open door policy
An informal 'open door' policy makes it too easy for staff to pass problems back to you the moment they get stuck. Ditch it. Instead, put time aside each day in your diary that is specifically for the team to book in for help or a work review. This simple change forces them to be more organised. They have to think through a problem and collect their questions, rather than interrupting you with every minor query.
Make accountability a daily habit
To ensure important work isn't being constantly pushed to the bottom of the pile, in favour of the easy stuff, start a daily accountability practice within your business. Ask every team member to email the group at the start of the day with the specific tasks they commit to finishing by the end of the day. This creates a clear, public commitment and helps you see if difficult jobs are being avoided.
Whilst this daily accountability maybe too much for your business, you may like to use it in times when the team is stretched? Or move it to a weekly accountability practice?
Review work together
When you review a team member's work, do it with them, live. It is much harder to submit incomplete or shoddy work when you have to sit next to the person who is reviewing it. It turns the review from a simple checking exercise into a powerful, real-time coaching session.
Set clear expectations
Often, owners feel their team should be doing more, but they have not been explicit about what 'more' actually means. For example, have you sat down formally with a team member and told them what work you expect them to do? Or what work you expect them to delegate to others and not hang onto? Have you set objectives for them around the volume and quality of work you expect from them?
Ideally each team member should have a quarterly 1:2:1 to set and reset their objectives and also review their development plan. Then every month your team member should have a 1:2:1 to go through how they are doing on their objectives.
When we get busy or think we are just ‘too small’ to do this, basic people management stuff, this is when we get into the situation where we need our team to step up.
In summary
Your number one priority as a leader is to make sure your team feels capable and happy in their work. However:
You get the team you deserve
This means training them to think for themselves, but making sure they are confident to ask you if they don’t know how to do something. Your team need to know that you will be hard on the source of the problem, not the person who made the mistake or who is struggling to move a piece of work on.
If you start a habit of stepping in and doing the work for your team member, then you’ll never be able to move away from being working day-to-day with clients.
Your action this week
Who in your team could do with you sitting with them to review their work?
