I cannot stress enough how important it is never to stop actually doing the work yourself. This doesn’t mean that you always do the work individually, but it does mean that you need to make sure that you’re not one of the many managers who actually have no idea how to get the job done. I see this far too often with middle and upper management And even the smaller sized companies, and it should not be happening.

If you were managing someone or a group of people, and you don’t know how they actually do their job, how can you possibly effectively manage them? One common response I hear repeatedly is that the manager doesn’t need to know how the widget gets made, just that the widget is made. I reply, how do you know they’re making the widget in the best possible way, with the most efficiency, with the most profitability baked into it? The reality is that there is no answer to that question if you don’t know how the widget gets made. You know how the widget gets made, but you don’t do the work; truthfully, you don’t really know  How it could be done better.

Always leave time in your schedule, even if it’s only once in a while, to get in there and actually do the work yourself. Two main things are bound to happen. The first is that you will appreciate the skill sets of your team, which does the work so much better than you, which is exactly why you pay them to do what they do. The second thing that always happens is that you will find something in the workflow that could be improved that your team is not able to see. This is why you lead them, and this is why you have the position that you do. But in order to find that thing that can be changed, you must do the work yourself.

Now, get to it!