Podcast Ep 98 | Are you unintentionally doing other people's jobs?

Are you an answer dis­penser? Many lead­ers acci­den­tal­ly find them­selves doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs — and not increas­ing the capa­bil­i­ties of their teams. While try­ing to be help­ful, you are pre­vent­ing oth­ers from hav­ing full auton­o­my and account­abil­i­ty for their job — and not hav­ing enough time to do your own job.

In the pod­cast this week, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence dis­cuss a trap that many lead­ers fall into: unin­ten­tion­al­ly doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. If you’re answer­ing too many ques­tions as a leader, you hold back the growth of your team and reduce oper­a­tional efficiency.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. Ideas, tips, tricks, tech­niques, to help peo­ple live up to that aspi­ra­tion of build­ing an amaz­ing orga­ni­za­tion. I’m Kevin Lawrence. And as always, I’m here with Brad Giles, my co host part­ner. Alright, well, let’s jump in the word of the day. What’s your word of the day?

Brad Giles 01:11

Look, I’ve said it before. But it’s account­abil­i­ty. Gee, it’s such an issue that we just deal with, from what feels like 360 degrees in all its forms on such a reg­u­lar basis. So it’s account­abil­i­ty. That is hold­ing peo­ple account­able, estab­lish­ing a sys­tem of account­abil­i­ty, and a frame­work and get­ting peo­ple com­fort­able in that. What’s yours?

Kevin Lawrence 01:40

I love how our thoughts are on dif­fer­ent tracks. Mine was free­dom. Which is almost the oppo­site of account­abil­i­ty, in some cas­es, not nec­es­sar­i­ly, but just free­dom to and grate­ful for the free­dom to be able to do the things that we want to be able to cre­ate the things that we want to be able to work with the peo­ple that we want, and how free­dom is obvi­ous­ly impor­tant to many of us. But I find that you know, I have the great­est free­dom when I’m work­ing with the best teams.

Brad Giles 02:12

And I’ve nev­er stitched before, this is always your thing. But I know, we have a per­son that we both know who has a say­ing which is rou­tine will set you free. And so maybe its account­abil­i­ty will set you free. Maybe the free­dom that you seek comes from accountability.

Kevin Lawrence 02:33

Whoa, and that would weave beau­ti­ful­ly into today’s top­ic, Brad. What are we talk­ing about today? Cuz that’s, that’s a nice lit­tle transition.

Brad Giles 02:46

Today, we’re talk­ing about a con­cept that I out­lined in my book, which is oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. Right? So today’s episode is ask­ing the ques­tion, Are you unin­ten­tion­al­ly doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. Because if you are, it could be a problem.

Kevin Lawrence 03:11

As well for you and for them. And thing is, often when peo­ple start doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs, their intent is good. Like it’s to either help the per­son or make sure the job gets done for the cus­tomer. It’s a noble intent often, um, but we won’t real­ly get today is that often when your intent is to be help­ful, you can also be hurt­ful. One, because when you do some­one else’s job, you rob them of the account­abil­i­ty, often, you can rob them of the learn­ing expe­ri­ences, you can law, rob them of the pain that comes from not doing a good job or fail­ing, and, and almost insu­late peo­ple from their own issues. That’s not always the case. But it can be but your intent is, it’s beau­ti­ful. I know. And you’re want­i­ng to do the best, but we’re hop­ing to under­stand is that when you’re doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs that you should­n’t be doing.

Brad Giles 04:07

So what we would encour­age as best prac­tice is that each role in the orga­ni­za­tion, any role has a sand­box and that Sand­box has out­puts such as KPIs, or the exe­cu­tion of pri­or­i­ties, or what­ev­er it might be. And all of the respon­si­bil­i­ties and account­abil­i­ties that live with­in that sand­box are owned by the per­son in that role. And so we don’t want to be step­ping into that sand­box and play­ing with that per­son­’s toys. We want them to get us to your point, the free­dom to suc­ceed in that sand­box because when you are ful­ly account­able, and you have that free­dom, that’s when mag­ic happens.

Kevin Lawrence 04:54

Yeah, and a lot of this starts from the per­spec­tive of the man­ag­er, right? And think of this as the man­ag­er get­ting over involved in their teams work. But the idea is when you remem­ber that as a man­ag­er, your job is, is to sup­port them and get their job done. But it is their job. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some of these peo­ple, we can be the guilty par­ty, but some of these peo­ple are mas­ters and have you think it’s your job, or they’re their mas­ters of del­e­gat­ing the account­abil­i­ty back up to you. Right, or espe­cial­ly when there’s risk involved, and many of them are very capa­ble. But if you’re a good enough suck­er that they can get you to do their work. And they don’t have to do it, espe­cial­ly if it’s the hard part, or the risky part. You know, many of them, though, are I’ve mas­tered that in their life, they just make it some­body else’s issue, and name­ly, yours. And it’s stuff you got to watch out for. And if you’re a sup­port­ive per­son, you can, you can get tak­en advan­tage of, and unfor­tu­nate­ly, they’re the ones get­ting ripped off because they’re not stretch­ing their own capabilities.

Brad Giles 06:00

And many times we set these traps our­selves because we hire some­one, okay, and we set them up, and maybe we have on board­ed them, maybe not, but this per­son has start­ed, and then we say to them, the crit­i­cal words, Kevin, if you’ve got any issues, just come and see me if you did­n’t ques­tions, just come and see me. Yeah. Because the end that we don’t say it, and I’ll answer those ques­tions. Okay. And what that does is it sets in motion a process that gen­tly, slow­ly turns a switch in their mind that stops them think­ing for them­selves in a lit­er­al sense, okay. And instead of them try­ing to solve prob­lems, if every sin­gle time from that point onwards, they come to us, and we answer the ques­tions. It’s like, we train them to come to us.

Kevin Lawrence 06:57

Train them to be stu­pid, yeah, train them to not use the brain, you train them to not grow. And it’s almost like if you had chil­dren, and every time they went out, you tied their shoes for them. Well, next thing, you know, your 15-year-old kid is com­ing you to get their shoes tied. Now, we’re smarter than that as par­ents, I hope but we often do that with our peo­ple, the same thing help­ful becomes hurt­ful because we hold them back. And they think they’re win­ning because they don’t have to do it. But again, they’re stunt­ing their own growth. So like you brought, I also wrote about this, there’s a book chap­ter I book called chief stop being a chief prob­lem solver. Basi­cal­ly, if you’re in an answer dis­penser, you’ve got a prob­lem. Because if you’re the answer dis­penser, you’re doing the think­ing, and they’re not. And so, I’ve worked with a pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices firm, and you know, they’re in the answer busi­ness. Right? And, and they’re very, very suc­cess­ful. But they were they’ve trained and they have a cul­ture of, any­time some­one comes with a ques­tion, they come with hav­ing done some research and have a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent options and a rec­om­men­da­tion. So they’ve trained every­one to try and do the think­ing, ver­sus com­ing in to get an answer. That’s orga­ni­za­tion­al dis­ci­pline. Now, the thing is, why are so many of us answer dis­pensers, I can be guilty of it some­times, too.

Brad Giles 08:27

Because it’s eas­i­er. I’ll just solve the problem.

Kevin Lawrence 08:32

Our ego loves it. It is so self-val­i­dat­ing. Let me show you how smart I am I have the answer. Well, of course, you have the answer. You’ve been doing the job for 20 years, you should have the answer to almost every ques­tion of oper­a­tional ques­tion at least. But your job is to train them to be more capa­ble and inde­pen­dent. So every time you’re answer­ing those ques­tions, you’re not doing your job of mak­ing that per­son more capa­ble and inde­pen­dent. Because of course, you know the answer. And your ego loves to rein­force the fact that you know the answer. It’s just not good for any­body. Because when you’re busy answer­ing ques­tions all the time to the peo­ple around you don’t get any smarter. And three, as the busi­ness grows, you’ve got a weak team, and more and more pres­sure on your shoul­ders. It’s just and we’re not No, I don’t want to sound judge you, we all slip into it. It’s just such a bad habit to get into.

Brad Giles 09:28

When I was a CEO of my own busi­ness, I went through this epiphany for want of a bet­ter word. And I remem­ber I would come back to the office and walk in and there’d be about 20 peo­ple would put their eyes their head over the work­sta­tion and think oh he’s back I can go and ask him a ques­tion. And that’s not a real­ly sus­tain­able posi­tion to be in. And I can only sus­pect that some of our lead­ers who are lis­ten­ing to this pod­cast have expe­ri­enced the same thing. And I, num­ber one, I made it real­ly clear, who do you report to? If you’re three lay­ers away from me, don’t be com­ing to me and ask­ing for ques­tions, unless it’s to do with, I don’t know, my car or my house or some­thing like that. Yes. So it made that real­ly, real­ly clear. But then the peo­ple who report­ed to me, I explained to them, we’re going to work through every week­ly meet­ing. And I’m only going to ask ques­tions, okay, you’re going to answer the ques­tions. And what that did remem­ber, when I said when peo­ple start, they flip that switch it slow­ly flip that switch back, where what that meant is that those peo­ple, they start­ed to think he’s not going to bloody answer this ques­tion anyway.

Kevin Lawrence 10:54

So for exam­ple, and all humans can slip into this. But let’s talk about some of the tech­niques you can use to not do peo­ple’s job. And again, there’s get­ting in there and being over help­ful. A lot of it has to do in lead­er­ship roles about answer­ing ques­tions and things like that. We’ll share some of them. So one of the tech­niques, I use this a lot, but it’s like, what do you rec­om­mend? Yeah, like, at the end of the day, what’s your rec­om­men­da­tion I want? You know, at the end of the day, basi­cal­ly, hey, how about you do a lit­tle bit of think­ing, and you come here and give me a rec­om­men­da­tion? Inter­est­ing­ly, I’ve got an amaz­ing team. Amaz­ing — and peo­ple still come up with ques­tions, not that much. Because they know that I don’t real­ly want to answer them. And they’re capa­ble enough to do it them­selves. But some­one the oth­er day, I had a sit­u­a­tion. That was some­thing that’s hap­pened before. And they came and said, Okay, here’s the sit­u­a­tion. Here’s what we think we should do. And here is how I think I’m going to han­dle it. And I just said, sounds good. You got my sup­port. That’s it. It was so well thought through. But they also knew they knew what I was gonna say, Well, what’s your rec­om­men­da­tion? How can you solve this? And also, how can we pre­vent this in the future? Any­ways? It’s just it’s very. So basi­cal­ly, what do you rec­om­mend and train­ing peo­ple to get anoth­er habit is one thing, what are some oth­er things that you can do? In the sit­u­a­tion, you find your­self stuck in it?

Brad Giles 12:27

Well, as I’ve men­tioned, before, you said that just ask­ing ques­tions. So hav­ing when you’re inter­act­ing with a per­son who you’ve, you know, trained in that way, think the only way I can deal with them is to have a ques­tion mark at the end of a sen­tence. It’s a lit­tle game that you can play. Like, I’d say, Hel­lo. But I could say, How are you doing today? Okay, that’s a ques­tion. And you can just make it into. And that’s what I did make it into a game where you can make sure that every­thing that you’re doing is only ask­ing ques­tions, yep.

Kevin Lawrence 13:10

A lit­tle warn­ing, if this isn’t what you’re doing, and you start doing it, all of a sud­den, you’ll freak peo­ple out. So one of the things we’ve learned is to let your team know, hey, what I’ve real­ized is, I’m the answer dis­penser, you’re not increas­ing our capa­bil­i­ty. So here’s how we’re going to change things going for­ward, just so you know, what’s com­ing. And and and it’s, it can dri­ve peo­ple crazy when you want to answer a ques­tion and hear me. It’s not that you nev­er answer a ques­tion again. But you know, 70 80%, say that 80% of the time, you’re going to try and get them to do it. Some­times you’re still gonna answer the damn ques­tion. Don’t turn into a robot that only has state­ments with ques­tions at the end.

Brad Giles 13:52

What do I like to say on that is if they come to you and say, so what we’re going to do is we’re going to get to atoms inside plu­to­ni­um, and we decid­ed we’re going to smash them togeth­er, then that’s prob­a­bly a good idea to, you know, flip that opin­ion back hav­ing an opin­ion is exactly.

Kevin Lawrence 14:10

So we’re talk­ing about 80% of the time, you’re still going to answer some­thing. It’s just that gen­er­al­ly, if you get, you know, 100 ques­tions in a week, we’re try­ing to get 80 or 90 of them that they answer them­selves, or at least they try to answer them­selves ver­sus just the default, you help­ing out too much and being too help­ful or too knowledgeable.

Brad Giles 14:29

Let’s now flip around and think about an A‑player. So imag­ine if you’re an A‑player, who is report­ing to a CEO who must answer every ques­tion, okay, so this is a top per­former, some­one who’s a super­star in their field and they come into your firm, and you tell them by either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, I’m going to answer every ques­tion and there will be no risk and anoth­er one another.

Kevin Lawrence 14:58

You’re gonna want noth­ing. to do with you, they’re gonna be far they are. And it’s inter­est­ing. You know, I’ve got very, very strong peo­ple on my team. And I was inter­est­ing hav­ing an inter­ac­tion with one or the oth­er guys, it was a very suc­cess­ful exec­u­tive. And he’s one of our amaz­ing, awe­some con­sul­tants. And, and it was worth and coach. So we’re talk­ing about some­thing and I know with him, my job is to ask a cou­ple ques­tions. He does­n’t need any­thing from me. And if I, if I get too involved, he’s gonna be like, What are you doing? Yeah. Right, because he has the auton­o­my and the account­abil­i­ty and the intel­li­gence. Now we’re work­ing on this one project. And I said, okay, at some point, I know you’re going to deliv­er on this thing, you’ll crush it, we just need to make sure that we’re in sync at prob­a­bly two points in this project. So okay, so where would the points where you and I review progress and syn­chro­nize around where we’re at before we go to the next step, almost like, if you’re build­ing a house, let’s syn­chro­nize before we buy the land. And then let’s syn­chro­nize on the final draw­ings, before we get the build­ing per­mits and order the mate­r­i­al, you know, a cou­ple of key check­points, but oth­er­wise, and so we just decid­ed on a cou­ple of check­points and away we go. Yeah, but he’s not gonna ask me any ques­tions. He’s just gonna go and do it and come with rec­om­men­da­tions, he might ask a cou­ple lit­tle things. But he does­n’t want to have to come and ask me a bunch of ques­tions. And that’s the key thing, because he’s a super strong a player.

Brad Giles 16:29

And we think that we’re help­ing them by answer­ing ques­tions. But we, and we think that, you know, it’s too hard to train them to think for them­selves in the way that we do things. Look, it’s eas­i­er if I just do it myself, or if I just answered this question.

Kevin Lawrence 16:46

But as we’re think­ing here, right, it real­ly our job is to ask a bunch of ques­tions. And but not answer a bunch of ques­tions. Yeah, we should be most­ly ask­ing. And rarely answering.

Brad Giles 16:59

Yeah, I mean, and that real­ly, real­ly comes back to the old say­ing that if you’re the smartest per­son in the room, you’re prob­a­bly in the wrong room.

Kevin Lawrence 17:07

Yeah. Exact­ly. Awe­some. I love this. So the root of every­thing that we’re talk­ing about is, is that if you’re answer­ing a lot of ques­tions, or being over­ly help­ful, you hold peo­ple’s growth back. Yeah. And you’re rob­bing them of their account­abil­i­ty. And gen­er­al­ly, you’re gonna have a lot more pres­sure on your shoul­ders. And that pres­sure is meant to be dis­trib­uted, not car­ried by you. So your intent may be beau­ti­ful. And think about it with the peo­ple that you’re work­ing with? Where are you like­ly get­ting involved in doing peo­ple’s jobs? Where are you own­ing some of their accounts that you should­n’t, and maybe it’s been fine? But you want to trans­fer more of that to them. And as a leader, our job is to trans­fer more and more to oth­er peo­ple, ide­al­ly, the right or the left some­thing for you to think about?

Brad Giles 17:57

Yeah. Any leader of peo­ple, your job is to grow the peo­ple around you to grow them. And you can’t do that, if you’re answer­ing all of their ques­tions. Don’t do oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. Because if and this is the final point, is that if you’re doing oth­er peo­ple’s jobs, and all that that entails. And it real­ly loops back to the first point, you’re not doing your job. Exact­ly, then who’s doing yours? Nobody. And then you’re not focused on the three years and the strat­e­gy and all the stuff we spoke about in last week’s episode, and then you won­der why the com­pa­ny might not be scal­ing at the lev­el that you hoped for exactly.

Brad Giles 18:39

What a very good episode. What a very good chat. Yeah, make sure that you’re doing your job and not oth­er peo­ple’s jobs. A good a good prin­ci­ple. Okay, so I think with that, we’re ready to wrap. So this has been the growth whis­per­ers. I’m Brad always joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. You can find the YouTube ver­sion at YouTube, obvi­ous­ly, by search­ing the growth whis­per­ers. Kevin has a newslet­ter that he puts out each week and you can find that at Lawrence and co​.com Now I have an inter­est­ing newslet­ter as well that you can find at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com that I do. We do hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode, and hope­ful­ly we’ll be able to catch up again next week.