The hour you never have for your team

The hour you never have for your team

Ask an owner why they didn’t sit down with the person who worked a process wrong and go through it, and you’ll often get an answer that sounds like this. “As an owner, I just don’t have time to sit down and give my team feedback. I don’t have time to go through everything in detail. I just had to do it and get it out the door. We were under a deadline, and that meant the easiest way to get it sorted was for me to do it myself. Since then, I’ve not really thought about it.”

Since then, I’ve not really thought about it. That’s the line. Not because the owner doesn’t care, but because the moment passed, the work went out, and the next thing was already knocking on the door.

You already know the hour would pay for itself

Nobody I talk to disputes the maths. An hour spent properly showing someone how a piece of work should be done saves hours and hours over the following months. Owners say it themselves. “Spending an hour with a person properly delivering something and going over it might be very much worth hours and hours in weeks and months to come, but right now all I’m thinking about are the things that need doing today.”

So it isn’t a knowledge problem. The owner knows that. It’s that the hour never exists. The day is full before it starts, the deadline is real, and the quickest route from “this is wrong” to “this is done” is always the same person, the owner. If you had an hour spare, of course you’d spend it showing somebody. You don’t have an hour spare. Capacity is the problem, not intent.

And this is what makes it different from the usual delegation story. The owner isn’t saying the team can’t do it. Quite the opposite. “I think my team are really capable. I just don’t have the time to train them. If I trained them, they’d probably be able to do it as quick as me. But when do I get to do that?”

That’s worth noticing, because the standard advice assumes the owner has given up on the people. A lot haven’t. They’ve given up on finding the time.

What happens the second time

So, many owners try it a second time, and then it comes back wrong again, and something shifts.

Ask what goes through an owner’s head when the same thing comes back wrong a second time, and the answer goes in two directions at once. “My team are fine. My team are a decent team. I’d like them to be more proactive, I’d like them to want to learn more - but then they probably might already feel that way. They just don’t get much of me. So when stuff comes back wrong I blame myself, because I’ve generally not spent enough time doing what I need to do when I’m trying to delegate. Either that, or I just get frustrated and take it off them and think that they’re not capable.”

Read that back and both halves are there. Blame yourself for not having given them enough. Or get frustrated and take it back. A lot of owners swing between the two, sometimes in the same afternoon. Either way the work ends up back with you, which means the hour still doesn’t exist, which means next time it comes back wrong too.

There’s a quieter feeling underneath the first half, and I think it’s worth naming. It isn’t frustration with the team. It’s guilt about them. You’ve got good people, and you know you’ve never given them what they’d need to be as good as you want them to be. That guilt is understandable, but it’s pointed at the wrong thing. You haven’t let them down through lack of care. The week has never had an hour in it to give, certainly in the ways that you currently operate.

The hour isn’t coming, so stop waiting for it

This is the part I’d push back on, gently. If the plan for getting your team up to speed is “when I get an hour”, then there is no plan, because that hour has very likely been due for a long time. The week that gave you an hour spare would be a week where the business was already running without you, and if it did that, you wouldn’t need the hour. It’s a cycle.

So the fix can’t be finding time. It has to be changing what the time is used for when the work comes back wrong, because that moment happens anyway. You’re already spending the time. You’re spending it redoing the work.

Two facts worth having here. Research by the Chartered Management Institute in 2023 found that 82% of UK managers came into a role with no formal management or leadership training. I think the very same is true of business owners. If nobody ever showed you, how to show somebody else, you’re in the majority. And the government’s Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024, covering 8,396 SME employers, found that only 39% of micro-businesses with employees had arranged or funded any training at all in the previous year. That isn’t because owners of small businesses don’t value their people. It’s because the hour doesn’t exist, and everyone is waiting for it.

One thing to do this week

The next time something comes back wrong, don’t fix it and don’t hand it back as it is. Do a third thing, and it takes anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes rather than an hour.

Sit with the piece of work and the person, if you’ve got one, and appraise it. Don’t rewrite it, just appraise it - quickly. Three things: what’s wrong, what right would have looked like, and how they could have checked that themselves before it reached you. Write those three things down, on the work itself, on a scrap of paper, an e-note, whatever, just write it down and give it to them, along with the piece of work to do again.

That’s it. You’ve spent a short period of time from the time you were going to spend anyway re-working, except that this time something got written down, and the next version of the work has a standard to be checked against that isn’t your memory. It isn’t pretty or grandiose, however it will start to work. Do it three or four times on the same piece of work and you’ll find the ‘SOP’ (standard operating procedure) has written itself. That SOP is the process/training you never had time for, built out of the moments you were already losing.

If this is your week

Follow me on any of my social sites or on LinkedIn. I write about how owner-led businesses get the work to stop needing the owner, mostly through small changes to what already happens rather than big programmes nobody has time for.

And if you’d like to look at where the work in your business keeps coming back to you, head over to my website and take my delegation check: five questions which will deliver some insight around your situation and the likely best place to start to fix it.

Delegation check - https://pauljarman.coach/delegation

Alternatively, book a Clarity Call with me. It’s free, it takes twenty to thirty minutes, and we’ll look at your specific scenario and business rather than a general one, and dive straight in to identifying where you could gain benefits in days rather than months.

Book a Clarity Call - https://pauljarman.coach/book-a-call-delegation