"More Yoda, less Hero"

Our main role as managers is to grow our team and ultimately attempt to become unnecessary. To do so, you need to trust your team and let them build their decision making and problem solving muscles. Yes, sometimes as managers, you’ll still have to take out your mini lightsaber and fight off the emperor but most of the time you should bring the problems to the team.

Bring it to the team.

It is harder to do than we think. Most of us have started our careers as individual contributors which means that we find solving problems to be cool. To save the day from time to time feels great. More than that, when you solve a problem you can write it in the done column for the day. Most management work is diffuse and it can be hard to know what you’ve actually done at the end of the week. The best thing you can do to help your team grow is to let them take the decisions and solve the problems. It does mean that you’ll have to accept their decisions if they still want to go save their friends on cloud city after you’ve explained the situation. This simple sentence packs so much management knowledge in 4 words, this is why it is one of my favorite.

note: The sentence is not from me an I apologize for the sin of not including the original author. I’ve seen this multiple times in different versions over the last 20 years and not making it a less powerful formula, not remembering its origin does.

More Yoda, less Hero

Thanks for reading,
@morelcorpjeff

p.s. Yep, I’m totally using Grogu here as a clickbait to have you read this post😇.

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