For a good while, I led my team by moving around. I'd arrive at a location, spend the day, clear whatever was pending, and leave. It gave me the feeling of being present everywhere.
The moment I understood it wasn't working came on a Tuesday, at one of our locations. Someone walked me through a way of doing things that existed nowhere else in the company. It wasn't a mistake on her part. It was her best solution to a problem nobody else had seen, because nobody else was there to see it.
She had done good work. I had organized badly.
That day I realized I had become the only link between locations. All the information went through me, so nothing circulated when I wasn't in the room. A company spread across several cities isn't led by being everywhere. It's led by making your presence unnecessary.
Here are the three things I changed.
I stopped travelling according to urgency. Before, I went wherever things were heating up. The result was that my visit announced a problem, and the locations where everything was fine never saw me.
Now my visit schedule is set in advance and everyone knows it. Each location knows when I'm coming and can prepare what they want to bring me.
Two details make all the difference. First: I keep the date even when nothing is pressing, because a visit cancelled twice in a row teaches everyone that the schedule means nothing. Second: I no longer settle matters during the visit. I listen, I take notes, and I answer afterward through the normal channel. If I decide on the spot, I teach everyone that a decision requires waiting for my visit, and I recreate exactly the problem I set out to eliminate.
Having someone on site is useless if that person has to call me to decide. It adds a step instead of removing one.
So I wrote down what each lead can settle alone. Not vague principles about autonomy: a list. What gets decided on site, what gets decided with me, and the amount above which they call me.
The exercise was more uncomfortable than I expected. Writing the list, I saw how many small decisions climbed all the way to me for no good reason other than habit. I also understood that I had to accept decisions being made differently than I would have made them. A sound decision made the same day beats a perfect decision made three days later, and a person whose decisions get taken away stops proposing any.
The rule I hold myself to: if I find out afterward that I would have done otherwise, I talk to the person, but I don't overturn their decision in front of their team. Otherwise their authority means nothing, and everyone starts calling me again.
The third change is the simplest, and it's the one that changed daily life the most. One meeting a week, short, at the same hour, with the leads from every location.
It holds three points per person: what moved forward, what's stuck, and what they want to ask the others. The third point matters most, because it's the one that creates direct links. When the lead in one city calls the lead in another without going through me, the meeting has done its job.
I never move it. A ritual you shift when the calendar gets full isn't a ritual anymore, it's one more meeting, and it eventually disappears.
Take a sheet of paper and list the decisions you made this week in someone else's place. Not the ones you were asked to make: the ones you made when the person on site could have made them.
Twenty minutes is enough. Then pick three of them and tell the person concerned that from now on, they decide. Name them precisely, otherwise the permission stays theoretical.
It's an unpleasant exercise the first time, because you discover you're often the bottleneck yourself. It's also the fastest to pay off.
For those of you leading a team across more than one location: what's the one thing you stopped deciding yourself, and what did it change?
It's a subject I'm still learning about, and the best ideas I've had on it came from other business owners, not from management books.