As many of you know, I owned a restaurant back in the day, and I had the largest ground floor outdoor patio in Boulder. I drove up to the building on a random 70 degree day in January where the sky was blue and the clouds were puffy and white. I also encountered a line out the door and around the building for people wanting to bask in the sun and drink margaritas.
I was woefully unprepared! I didn’t have enough staff, or enough pre-made margaritas! I called some people in to help, then I went back in the kitchen to make our house margaritas by the big buckets.
What is wrong with this picture, you might ask?
While my staff was thrilled to have me help them get our customers served as quickly as possible, it was a short-term fix to a much larger issue. When we would get hit with a rush of people, as the owner of the company, my time was NOT best served by helping out my staff in the moment… my time was best served by getting more staff on the floor in order to help the customers get their orders. In other words, I needed to focus on the bigger picture… why we were short staffed at all in that moment.
I see this all the time with my clients, and this article does a great job of explaining when leaders need to delegate tasks, and when they don’t. https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/mentoring-matters/2024/07/ask-marcia-duties-leader.html?utm_source=st&utm_medium=en&utm_campaign=nch&ana=e_n_bizwomen_tease
You as the leader of your business, or the leader of your department, need to make sure that you stay focused on the business/department as a whole. Instead of making the margaritas, I needed to make sure that the margaritas got made. Then, everyone was much happier, and the shifts ran more smoothly.
POWER THOUGHT: Instead of making the margaritas, make sure that the margaritas are made and made right.