The final step before you take your break is handing over everything you’ve spent the last 8 steps creating:
Make sure you’ve resheduled meetings or activities that must be done by you for before or after your break, so your calendar can be blocked out for your holiday, and for a day or so after you come back.
Check that your phone is being answered as you want it, and that texts and messages are coming to the right place. This might normally be you, but while you’re away you could have someone else copied in to deal with calls.
Make sure any automations you’ve set up are working correctly – auto-responders, scheduled posts, repeating invoices. If you can’t check before you go, appoint someone in your team to check for you (another thing to add to ‘Open for Business’, or ‘Close for Business’?)
Make sure everyone knows where shared resources – your Promise of Value summary, FAQs, process descriptions, emergency contact numbers, can be found. Both physically and electronically if need be. Make sure everyone has access to them.
Make sure people know where to find each other’s work too, so they don’t have to interrupt you to answer a simple client question.
Make sure everyone has practised the processes they will need to be able to run while you’re away. Help them get into the habit of following the processes you’ve set up by refusing to answer questions.
Resist the temptation to do what you’ve always done and just take over. Instead bat any query back to them with questions of your own, such as:
“What does the process description say?”,
“What’s our Promise?”, “How would you make sure it was kept in this situation?”,
“What does the FAQs say?”, “Should that be a new FAQ then?”
Before long you may even find that this rubs off, and everyone is batting questions back at each other.
If people are really hesitant to run a process you’ve defined, try the equivalent of pair-coding – get two people to run it together. For a couple of weeks while you’re away, any loss of productivity will be more than made up by a gain in confidence and the formation of a good habit.
After all your aim here is not to hand over responsibility temporarily, but to make a start on handing it over permanently.
Because that’s how you, and the rest of your team will be able to take more frequent, longer breaks from your business without any of your clients feeling the difference.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
