Doing Everything Is Not Dedication

“When you do too much, you are setting your company up for failure.” 

This flawed perspective can have many negative implications:

• Your business will not grow: You become the bottleneck. It is impossible for a business to gain any momentum when everything waits for you. You see your passion, dedication and attention to detail as a huge plus. Others see it as detrimental to the growth of the business.
• Employees, investors and  customers will question your leadership: When sophisticated individuals hear “I’m the only one that can do this,” they question your ability to lead the company. At early stages of the business, many people you are interacting with are putting you in one of two buckets:
• It will undermine your ability to engage  employees: Senior employees will question whether your management style will give them the authority and accountability to execute, or will they be micromanaged instead. Senior employees don’t want to work in a company that looks like a “solar system”—where you are the sun and everything revolves around you. They want to join a team with a chain of command that allows them to naturally execute in their area of expertise.
• Your productivity will suffer: Junior employees will become less productive as they wait for you to weigh in. When you do weigh in, you will likely change what has been done. While an edit may be in order, returning their work with 99 percent of the content in your pen, is discouraging and invalidates both the employee and the mentorship process. If you don’t allow them to make mistakes and learn, they will never grow and improve.
• Your business will have significant risk. While early stage entrepreneurs are almost always indispensable, once you are fortunate enough to have customers, employees, and investors, you have to minimize this risk. What would happen to your employees if you got hit by a bus? What would happen to the money your family invested? What would happen to your investors? Would your customers continue to do business with your company? When everything revolves around you, you create risk for your constituents that they must weigh when doing business with your company. Would customers purchase an Apple product if they thought that when the world tragically lost Steve Jobs their products would no longer work?

When you do too much, you are setting your company up for failure. Regardless of why, if you operate this way, it will stunt your business for a long time. You need to get your organization to the point that resources other than you can operate with efficiency and up to your expectations. At that point, you will be convinced that not everything has to be done by you.