In the pursuit of peak efficiency, many companies have raced to embrace all the improvements mobile can provide. As enterprise mobile experts, we certainly applaud that notion. Mobility can and does improve nearly every aspect of a business when employed correctly. But, it is not the end-all-be-all of efficiency. Despite countless advances in technology over the recent decades, one crucial component of efficiency hinges not on technology — people.
No matter the quality of technological tools we provide to our employees, faster, more efficient and better workers will always outperform less talented ones. Technology can make less talented employees more efficient, but talented employees can almost always leverage new technology even better, and will become that much more efficient for its use. That’s why, despite all the advantages mobile can bestow upon companies, hiring the right people is still one of, if not the, most important thing you as a decision maker can do.
Assuming you’ve done your job as a business leader and hired great talent, the next most important thing you can do? Get out of their way.
As employees, we want our managers to lean in. We want them to be invested in our success and care enough about our work to spend the time and effort to collaborate with us. What we don’t want, however, is to be micro-managed. We don’t want every single decision we make to flow through our manager, leeching away our autonomy.
If you as a manager feel the need to approve every decision your employee makes, you need to either mentor that employee better if you see a lot of potential in him or her, or let that employee go if you don’t. If you can’t trust your employees to make everyday decisions without your constant input, you either need to work on your confidence and trust in others if you’re the problem, or you need to reexamine the quality of employees you’ve hired if you’re not the problem.
Of course there will be major decisions that you always need to have a hand in making, but you absolutely should not have to be involved in every single action your employees make. You need to focus on hiring the right people to make your business as efficient and successful as possible, and then trust in the decisions you’ve made. And, if after an extended period of working with a new hire who you’re not comfortable empowering, you need to move on from that employee.
Employees want to feel empowered. They work harder when they feel like the work they do and the decisions they make matter. If you’ve done your job as a business leader and hired great talent, you owe it to them and to your company to get out of their way so they can do great work without being bottlenecked by requiring executive sign off on every action they take.
Mobility matters. Technology is hugely important. But if you don’t have the right people and motivate them appropriately, you’re only achieving a small potential of your company’s peak efficiency.
