It feels nice to be wanted.  To be the fount of all knowledge .  To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question.  To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making.  To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware.  Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak.   An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first.  The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive.  It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make.  It can easily become a trap for you.  And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions.  Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know.  As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score.  Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience.  Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together.  Review the score.  Adjust if necessary.

 

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end.  Get it out there.