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Entrepreneurs: Break Free From the Control Freak Mindset

 
It’s hard to be a boss of a company you have built up from scratch. After spending so many weeks, months, and perhaps even years working on your ‘baby.’ the very thought of risking everything by delegating important tasks to other people can be incredibly worrying.


But here’s the thing: entrepreneurs who display this control freak mindset end up with far too much on their plate, and the result will often do more harm to your business than good. With this in mind, it’s vital that you try and curb your inability to let go, and start making inroads into giving your teams and employees more trust, value, and responsibility.


Here are a few things you can do to lose the control freak mindset and improve your business’s chances of success.



Start delegating


The first step is simple - start to give tasks to employees that you trust, and leave them alone to do it. Micromanaging is no good for anyone, and while your employees will be feeling nervous as you are looking over your shoulder, it’s also taking you away from the most important tasks. Start small, and offer trusted employees the chance to work on non-critical business activities, and see how you get on. It’s a small step, for sure, but it’s an important one that you must take if you want to stop being a control freak.

 

Look into the time drains


There will be a lot of different areas of your business that are suffering because you spend too much time micromanaging and trying to control every single action. Take your technology as the perfect example. As a control freak, your need to be informed of every minor tweak and sign off every action will eat up valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere - making money for your business, for example. You will be far better off finding IT services to take care of that side of things on your behalf. Then, you can take a top down view on your IT performance, and forget about the daily activities that are required to keep your business ticking over.



Better communication

If you feel like you have to stand over every employee or outsourced contractor while they do their work, it’s due to one person’s fault: yours. Excellent communication will help a lot, so make sure you explain what you need, how you need it, and what our expectations are. The simple truth is that you should be offering support rather than micromanagement, and proactivity rather than reactivity.



Better training


Again, if you don’t train your employees properly, it will be no surprise when they fail. And ultimately, that’s down to you in the vast majority of cases. At the end of the day, if an employee works hard but hasn’t had the right level of training, they are bound to fail - and it’s something you need to look at. Not only will it help your employees, but it will give you a guarantee they understand each and every brief you give them - and can help you curb your control freak mindset.


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