This year my whole extended family decided to extend our annual Hop’s family Beach Week to two weeks! While this was great, the two weeks in August could not have came at a worse time work-wise as there was a lot of activity going on and new work needed attention. Thus I decided to “work from home” the first three days of the our time at the beach.
Of course, I would have loved to take the full two weeks, I have PTO days that was not the problem. Yet, I felt the team needed me. Which got me thinking, I need to figure how to enable my team work by themselves and feel empowered to make decisions. For a while now I thought that was exactly what I was doing. Allowing my team to be independent and make the best decision they thought. When I started to feel the pressure that my team really needed me to help develop and make some decisions, I started to think I need to work harder at ensuring my team feels safe to work and make the call.
My team members are in the best position to make the important project decisions as they have the most information. I on the other hand, am involved in many projects at a high level trying to coach and push the teams to do their best. Which means my I can help ensure teams are thinking about their choices and ensure all the decisions make sense at an enterprise level; yet I should not be the sole decision maker. My voice should be heard but be so strong I alway win.
The rest of my PTO I will be thinking about how to better enable my team.