Leadership
Good leaders don't make good followers because they make more good leaders.
Show. Tell. Check. Correct. That's how you teach people and empower them to work on projects. Start off with show and tell and demonstrate how something works (or how you want it to work). Let them start working on it. If necessary, let them schedule a time every day when they can ask questions if they are stuck. But only during that time can they ask questions, so they should charge up their list of questions to make the brief meeting as efficient and valuable as possible. When they get the answers to the questions, they should write them down and save them to share with anyone else who may have the same question. This is an efficient way of teaching people what they want to learn and maximizing the value you can produce with your time by making the advice easy to reuse.
Once they start doing work for you, you will need to check on their progress and provide feedback. If you need to write a full sales email to someone, delegate it to someone else and then come back with a red pen to provide feedback. Let them do 90% of the work and then get your approval. Let everyone else drive projects and you can just do the steering occasionally as needed. People learn from doing and people feel empowered by letting them do things. Learning is a lifelong journey, so every new task that you are assigned is an opportunity to learn how to solve a new type of problem or a similar problem in a more efficient way.
It's all about making things as efficient and automated as possible. Systems beat genius thanks to Steve Hyman.
10/80/10 Rule
Spend the first 10% of the project with the team to set the course and long term objectives. Explain the why. Let them figure out the how.
Get out of their way.
Let the project manager or team run with it for 80% of the project.
Review deliverables from the project manager when it is 90% complete to give feedback to apply finishing touches before you ship it.
Feed the people around you today with encouragement, recognition, security, and hope.
To help people discover what drives them, John Maxwell asks these questions:
What do you sing about?
What do you cry about?
What do you dream about?
The first two questions speak to what touches you at a deep level today
The third answers what will bring you fulfillment tomorrow
How Managers Become Leaders by Harvard Business Review