It takes 20 years to build a new manager. 20 years where those responsible for delegating constantly oscillate on the edge of anxiety.
The risk behind delegation
Like tightrope walkers, managers swing between the fear of being surpassed by people who might have something more than them and the risk that their team will lose drive and, ultimately, competitiveness by relying on inadequate people. Leaders who take the path of delegation risk falling painfully. But those who make it and get to the end receive applause from the audience—the same audience that lives in constant expectation of the fatal misstep.
It takes 20 years, and faced with such a long period, which is half of a person’s working life, we understand how important it is to keep collaborators with us. It’s a patience that can be very costly. Sometimes managers in training are tempted to leave. When people want to leave, it’s difficult for them to perform at 100%.
I once heard an entrepreneur say, “These young people deceive us, maybe they’re good, we invest in them and then they abandon us.”
And if we use money as leverage to make them stay, as entrepreneurs we show everyone that the value system on which we base the company is poor.
Bees and Gardeners
I believe in open systems, I believe in learning how to attract people who also have different backgrounds but are drawn to values, perhaps at a specific moment in their life trajectory.
In a company, there are bees and gardeners. There’s no point in forcing heroes to be farmers and vice versa; the company must be able to manage both.
A company must aim to keep the bees moving to spread pollen and cross-pollinate.
At the same time, we must preserve the gardeners, who year after year grow people, prune them, and make them bloom again.
Therefore, to grow the company, we need gardeners who cultivate people. To grow people, you need stimuli that trigger growth.
These incentives fail in a company that doesn’t scale.
Let’s face reality: on one side, the fear of losing people we’ve invested so much in and who have the power to grow others; on the other, the difficulty of giving these people continuous stimulation without losing power and control.
The challenge of growth
Power for the manager vs. emerging talent.
In this apparent dualism, leadership stories have played out since the dawn of humanity, and it’s only by resolving it that the best stories continue.
To resolve it, there’s only one way: find a challenge and grow toward it, solving obstacles one at a time. Growth is the only, forced path. In growth, there’s space for everyone.
The tightrope walker knows that to learn, you must walk on the same rope that can lead to oblivion. Every step is a risk.
Enough is the enemy
Walking the tightrope means aiming to improve 1% each day, which will allow us to accumulate significant growth in 20 years. Growing by 1% every week means improving 40 thousand times in 20 years of your career.
Unfortunately, this growth path is often precluded to entrepreneurs who cannot renew themselves due to the inability to see the future as an ally. The enterprise is born behind a dream of “abundance,” but often the dream is set aside for the enemy of “enough.”
Seeing “enough success” as an outcome makes one give up, waver, and settle. Those who have had enough success are more afraid of making mistakes, staying rooted in the experience of what they’ve gathered, like a parasitic plant clinging to a trunk. They won’t have their own form and won’t act like a gardener who needs to prune to make space for new shoots and new paths.
It takes 20 years to grow a manager. To avoid finding ourselves having wasted time after 20 years, we need daily steps to break out of the equilibrium we’ve achieved.
Featured image by Loic Leray on Unsplash
