Hiring people is supposed to create capacity. But what happens when bringing someone onto your team actually makes your business feel more complicated?

In this episode, Michelle Lynne gets honest about one of the parts of business ownership nobody warned her about: hiring people would force her to confront how much of her business was living inside her own head.

When you’ve built a business around your own instincts, experience, and standards, it’s easy to assume that what feels obvious to you will be obvious to everyone else. But your team can’t read your mind—and they shouldn’t have to.

Michelle shares the lessons she learned as her design firm grew, including why hiring initially created more work instead of less, how recurring team problems can reveal weaknesses in the business itself, and why delegation requires more than simply handing someone a list of responsibilities.

She also explores the uncomfortable reality that sometimes the problem really is the employee—but you can’t fairly determine that until you’ve looked at the role, the process, your leadership, and the support you’ve provided.

In this episode, Michelle talks about:

• Why hiring often begins with addition before it creates subtraction

• How a team exposes the parts of your business that have been running on your memory, instinct, and unwritten standards

• The difference between describing a task and actually defining what “good” looks like

• Why “be more proactive,” “use your judgment,” and “take care of the client” aren't actually clear standards

• The principle: “Every project is different, but the process should be the same.”

• How undocumented processes turn the owner into the answer to every routine question

• Why capable owners can accidentally create dependent employees by solving problems too quickly

• The difference between giving someone responsibility and giving them the authority to actually own it

• Why offering your perspective is different from taking the work back

• How delayed feedback can turn a simple conversation into a much bigger problem

• Why caring about your team can sometimes become an excuse for avoiding difficult conversations

• How to determine whether you're dealing with a people problem, a role problem, or a leadership/process problem

• When you have to accept that someone simply isn't the right fit for the role

• Why examining your own leadership doesn't mean taking responsibility for every failed hire

• What Michelle does differently today as she leads her design firm

A question to ask yourself

If you're frustrated with someone on your team right now, don't start with:

“Is she a good employee or a bad employee?”

Instead, look at the role.

Ask yourself:

• What has actually been made clear?

• What authority does she have?

• What feedback has she received?

• What support has been provided?

• Does the process actually support the work?

• Have I communicated what needs to be communicated?

• Have I given her enough room to make decisions?

If you've done those things and the same problem continues, you may finally have the information you need to address the person or the fit with confidence.

Because sometimes the answer is better direction.

Sometimes it's a better role.

And sometimes, uncomfortable as it may be, it's a different person.

The bigger lesson

Hiring isn't simply a way to purchase more capacity.

Hiring is a commitment to lead.

When someone joins your company, they're stepping into your clients, your history, your standards, your processes—and all of the assumptions you may not even realize you've made.

Your job as the owner is to make as much of that invisible information visible as you reasonably can.

Standards need to be stated.
Responsibilities need to be clear.
Processes need to be documented.
Feedback needs to happen while it can still be useful.
And authority needs to accompany responsibility.

Because the goal isn't to create a team that thinks exactly like you.

It's to create a business where talented people can make good decisions without needing the owner to be the answer to everything.

Work With Michelle

If you're in the middle of a team situation and you're too close to it to tell whether you have a people problem, a role problem, or a leadership problem, private coaching can help you step back, separate the facts from the frustration, and determine what needs to change.

Learn more about working with Michelle here: https://thedesignbakehouse.com/private-coaching

Keep Listening

This episode is part of Michelle's series about the parts of business ownership nobody warned us about—the messy, uncomfortable, and surprisingly valuable lessons that come with growing a company.

Because sometimes you don't need another business strategy.

You need to be willing to look at what your business is showing you.

Transcript:

MICHELLE LYNNE (01:02)

Me that hiring people would show me just how much of my business was being held together by things I knew but had never explained. When I was doing everything myself, the reason I felt overwhelmed seemed fairly straightforward. There was too much work and only one of me. I needed help, and I assumed that once I had it, the pressure would begin to ease. That I would just hand over part of the work, it would come off my plate, and I would finally have some room to focus on the things that needed me the most.

Some of that did happen eventually, but not in the clean way that I had pictured it. Hiring did not begin with subtraction. It began with addition. The work still had to be done, and now I also had to explain it, answer questions about it, review it, correct it, and decide when I should step in when I needed to let another person work through the problem. Y'all, I had hired because I did not have enough time, and suddenly the only way the hire was going to work.

was for me to give her time that I did not

feel like I had.

That part is difficult for almost every business owner because we usually do not hire from a calm, well-organized, proactive place. We hire because the work has outgrown us. We're tired. Clients are waiting. And there's a list of things that we hope another person can just pick up and take on. We may have a list of duties, a handful of examples, and a general sense, what good work looks like.

But that's not the same as creating a role that somebody else can succeed in. When the person does not immediately give us the relief that we expected, it's it's it's so tempting to decide that we made a bad hire. And admittedly, sometimes that is true. I've certainly learned that not every person is the right fit for every role. But hiring also forced me to consider another possibility, which was that I had never made the work clear enough.

For anyone other than me. And that's really uncomfortable because y'all, I could still see the finished result so clearly in my own mind. I knew what I meant when I said, take care of the client, use your judgment, make sure this feels finished. I knew what information I wanted to receive, what I considered unnecessary, what was like a non-negotiable.

I knew when something felt polished or when it felt as if somebody had stopped just one pass too soon. The problem was that much of that what I knew never made it out of my

head.

Now, a team has a way of making that visible. It reveals every place that the business is running on the owner's memory, instinct, private standards, decisions that were made once but never turned into the way the company actually operates. It also communicates how the owner communicates when she's busy. Or should I say it

reveals?

How the owner communicates when she is busy. Whether she addresses problems while they're still small, whether she genuinely gives people room to make decisions, or she only wants them to make the same decision she would have made. The team is learning the company, but the owner is learning something too. She is seeing the business from the perspective of someone who cannot fill in every blank with years of history.

and instinct. And that was the part that I I I I did not expect

it.

And here is what made this especially strange for me. It's that management was not new. Y'all, I had been in management since I graduated from college. Like, yes, I was a baby when I was managing. So I had worked inside many companies where expectations were documented, standards were defined, meetings had a purpose, and people understood how work moved through the organization. I knew.

how important it was to clarify responsibilities, to follow up, to keep records, and deal with issues before they become larger than they needed to be. Like I had held other people to those standards.

I had expected the companies that I worked for to give me that kind of structure in return. And then I started my own company and it all went out the window. I just somehow I did not begin with the same discipline. At first, everything was close enough to me that informality seemed manageable manageable. I knew what had been promised to the client because I was the one who had promised it. I was the one who had sold the project.

I knew why a selection had been made because I was the one who chose it. And I knew what needed to happen next because I was carrying the entire project in my head. So if something had not been written down, I could usually fill in the gap by myself because I could compensate for what was missing. But I didn't always recognize how much was missing.

And

there was also the nuance of owning the company compared to working in a company. Owning the company can make the structure feel less necessary, especially in the beginning. In a corporate environment, documentation is simply part of how the work gets done. In your own small business, that can feel like something you'll build later once there's more time, more staff, or more

certainty.

I would just tell myself the company's still changing, right? Every client's different. And a process would be out of date as soon as I wrote it. Some of that's true. But I think I was just using it as a very convenient explanation for continuing to operate from memory. Like looking back, I think I gave myself permission as an owner that I never would have accepted as a manager in another company.

I would allow an expectation to remain unspoken because it felt obvious to me. And I am guilty of changing a process without always making sure that everyone understood what had changed. I solved things in the moment rather than asking why the same problem kept returning. And none of that, none of it came from a lack of knowledge. I knew what good management required. I

Simply was not applying that knowledge to my own company with the consistency that I had once expected from somebody else's.

The lesson here is not that I needed to become a manager. I'd already been one. I just needed to bring her, that manager, into the company that I now owned. So once I saw it that way, like the it was this wild, like eye opening moment. It was like,

Yeah, that makes sense. And at that point, the work became more humbling and more practical. I I didn't need to discover a secret leadership method or a secret ownership method. I needed to return to things that I already understood. Define the standard, document the process, clarify who owns the decision, give feedback while it's still useful, and follow through on what I said mattered.

So knowing those things and doing them were very different. I had spent years knowing what to do. I I think this actually I I say I think, but in in real life, as my daughter would say, in real life, the shift came when I stopped treating my own business as the exception and I began doing it.

One of the first things that a team exposed was how often I expected people to infer what I meant. I was mortified. My husband and I, early in our marriage, would argue, like, I can't read your mind. Well, I can't read yours either. And here I was doing it to my team. Okay, so an employee would complete something differently than I expected. And my first reaction might be like, how does she know that this wasn't right?

how could she not know that this was not right? And to me, the gap was so clear that it was easy to interpret that it was a lack of care on her part, attention, judgment, whatever. man, I look back on those early days. And sometimes the person truly had missed something that she should have caught. Employees are adults, after all, okay, but they bring their own habits, their own judgment.

And level of responsibility to the work.

Leadership does not mean absorbing blame for every disappointing result, but it does mean that pausing long enough to ask what the person was actually given before deciding she's the entire problem. Does that make sense? had I explained the result that I wanted? Or had I simply described the task? Had I shown her an example? Did she understand why the detail mattered to the client or to the project?

Did she know that she was allowed to decide on her own and when I wanted her to ask for help? Had I been consistent or had the target moved depending on the day and the pressure that I was under?

Now, these questions are not especially dramatic, but they're useful.

They separate what belonged to the employee from what belonged to me and then what belonged to the way that the company at the time was structured.

And self-blame is not any more productive than blaming the employee.

Let's just look at the problem for what it is. Because if every problem becomes evidence that I'm a terrible leader and I am still making the situation about me.

Then the role still remains unclear.

What I began to notice was that the recurring problems usually carried some information. You just have to slow down enough to actually look at it. So if several people made the same mistake in the same part of the process, there's a good chance that the process needed attention. If capable employees repeatedly hesitated.

Perhaps they had learned that initiative was encouraged, like I I wanted the initiative, until their judgment differed from mine. If deadline slipped, the issue might have been performance, but it might have also been a workload in which priorities changed, shifted, rearranged, but nothing, none of the workload was ever removed.

What was happening is that my business was reflecting back to me through the people trying to work inside it. And it wasn't always pretty. That reflection, not so flattering. But I learned that it was useful because it showed me things that I couldn't see while I was compensating for them myself.

And I think an important lesson is I had to recognize the difference between wanting someone to take ownership and creating a role in which she could. Owners say that we want people to be proactive and we mean it, right? But at the same time, we may continue making every meaningful decision. Like, does everything land at on your desk?

Every meaningful decision, changing the answer after the fact, or stepping in so quickly that the employee never has a chance to develop judgment because we have a fear of letting go. And then we become frustrated that she keeps coming back to us. And I've seen this cycle in other firms. Thankfully, it did not repeat for a long time in mine.

But I've seen it continue from afar because here's the thing. Each person's behavior seems to prove the other person's point. Like the owner thinks, see, she can't make a decision without me. And the employee thinks, there's no point making the decision because she's gonna change it. And neither person is necessarily describing the whole truth, but that's how it feels. And together they've created a company in which the owner remains the answer to everything.

I did. I had to become, fairly fluent in where I was contributing to that pattern. I couldn't ask somebody to think independently and then require her to arrive at my exact answer every time. I could have standards and I could give direction, but if the role had real teeth, right? If it had real responsibility, then that role needed enough authority for the person to do the job.

And I think that you'll you'll agree with me when I say that creative businesses rely heavily on instinct. we notice what's not working before, we can always explain why. You can read a client, sense when a room is out of balance, anticipate a concern, and make those adjustments in real time. That instinct is part of the expertise clients are paying you for. And it is probably a part of what allowed the business to grow in the first place.

But the difficulty is that that instinct does not transfer simply because another person works beside you. So for example, if you say, make it feel elevated, I know what I mean, but I haven't necessarily given the other person anything that she can use. Right? What does more elevated mean? And the same is true if you're if you're using phrases like be more proactive, manage the client, or use your judgment.

Y'all, those statements describe a direction, but they do not explain the standard. A standard gives a person something that that's it's a lot more concrete. It's not completely concrete, but it it's a lot more than just the vague be more proactive. Okay. A standard will help your designer or your e your admin or your your office manager. It it helps them understand what good.

looks like, what matters most. And then we're giving them a standard of what should happen under normal circumstances where that judgment is required. Now

It it doesn't need to account for every possible exception. There's just no way to do that. And you know, in design or in in small business, in in our industry, especially, y'all, there's always exceptions. So the point is not to remove human judgment from the work, but the point is to stop making every ordinary situation feel like a brand new decision. This is where, this is where I came up with,

Every project is different, but the process should be the same.

So, because for a long time I resisted documenting certain things because every client and every project really was different. And I could think of an exception to almost any process, which made the process itself seem too rigid. But now, like what I understand is that the prom the process is not a promise that every situation will unfold exactly the same way.

But the process is an agreement about how we normally work. It establishes where we begin, who is responsible, what must be documented, and when something needs to be brought forward because it falls outside the norm.

So without this agreement, okay, without this standard operating procedure, every exception lands back in my lap, okay? It comes back to the owner, but then so does every routine question.

The owner ends up carrying both the decisions that need her expertise and her experience and the ones that should have been settled by the way the company works. Here's an example: change orders. you put change orders in. I don't have to approve them. The client knows that there's change orders because it's been explained in the contract. The designer is the one who needs to implement it, okay? Because the owner's busy all day.

If the team is still waiting for answers and everyone wonders why hiring hasn't created more capacity, it's because you're the bottleneck.

Another complication is that competence can work against the owner.

Because she can solve the problem quickly, she does. The client's waiting, the meeting is approaching, the project needs to move. So giving the answer feels efficient. let's just get this done. And in that moment, it usually is, right? But over time, the team becomes dependent on the person who is most frustrated by that dependence. I can see this in my husband with my daughter. He can solve the problem quickly, so he does.

And then he gets frustrated that my daughter can't make that decision or or do the thing. So that so if you're a mom or if you're a parent, you can relate to this back at home is the same thing that you're carrying to the office. If you if you were the helicopter mom doing things for your kid before they needed before they even thought about it, are you being a helicopter employer?

So over time, I learned to slow down long enough to ask what kind of help this moment actually needs. Does it require my decision because the risk or responsibility truly belongs to me? Does it require my perspective because there is something that the other person might not have considered or seen? Or does it simply require my confidence that she can work it out?

Maybe I give her guidelines and boundaries financially. You can make a decision up to X number of dollars. Figure it out. Okay? These are different forms of leadership. And when it was my business, y'all, I did not always distinguish between them. And I I know, I know I still don't get it right every time. There are days when it's just faster to give the answer, and there are situations in which speed matters.

But if I answer every question because I can, like I shouldn't be surprised when every question continues to come to me.

The work has been to translate enough of my instinct that another person can understand the principles behind that decision. So when I am making decisions for the team, for the company, it needs to be explained. Explain, explain, explain. And then I allow the team, the person's competent approach to look different than mine.

This doesn't mean that it's lowering the standard. It means making the standard clear enough that it does not depend on imitation.

I learned this principle years ago. Explain, explain, explain. Because I was definitely at fault in a previous management role where I just figured just because I said it that it needs to be done.

Y'all, if you've had kids, that doesn't work. Well, it doesn't work with adults either. Explain, and not only will they learn, but they're gonna learn from your experience without having to learn the hard way.

Hiring also exposed how much I wanted difficult things to resolve without requiring a difficult conversation. I care about relationships, I really do, and I don't think that it's a weakness to care about those relationships.

I believe that it has helped me understand clients, to build trust, and create teams where people really know that they matter. But the problem comes when caring for the relationship turns into avoidance. I would see an issue, I'd give it time, make an adjustment myself, and then hope the other person noticed. Yeah. Basically, I was wanting them to read my mind again, right?

And I I I I told myself I was being patient, but much of that patience was happening privately. The employee didn't even know that there was a concern, much less that I was waiting for her to correct it. So by the time I finally said something, I'd collected weeks or maybe months of examples. What could have been a straightforward conversation about one behavior early on now carried all the frustration that I had allowed to accumulate.

And of course, I'm sitting back here thinking, well, I have been patient for so long. From her perspective, the problem might have appeared all at once. You see how that works? And of course I'm gonna justify it. But this is one of the places where my standards and my communication did not match. I believed in direct, timely management, but inside my own company, I delayed it.

Because I didn't want somebody to feel criticized or discouraged. I didn't want to create the tension on this small team.

And in in hindsight, I might have also been avoiding the possibility that the conversation would require a decision that I wasn't ready to make.

So to clarify, clear feedback is not a guarantee that the conversation will go well. The person may disagree, the role might need to change, that working relationship might end.

So being the leader in your own business does not remove these possibilities. Being the leader in somebody else's business does not remove those possibilities.

But what it does is it asks, it asks us to stop using temporary comfort as the measure of whether we are doing right by someone.

And I knew this when I was in corporate and I have become much more aware in my own company that delayed feedback is rarely any kinder.

If anything, I'm closer to the people that I work with now, and I believe that they need to know what's expected, where they stand, what needs to change while there is still a reasonable chance to change it.

And of course, they deserve to hear when they're doing well, when we trust their judgment, and when we see the role growing. Avoidance is not limited to corrective conversations. Owners can also be strangely cautious about naming opportunity because once it's said out loud, it creates expectations.

But the silence leaves everyone to create their own story, their own explanation.

And the stories and the explanations that we create in our head are really more accurate than the conversation that would have been accurate.

I hope that makes sense.

Trying to put into words a lot of these feelings that I've had, a lot of observations. I will say that I'm better at this now because I understand the cost of waiting. Although I have to watch my instinct to give something more time. I generally believe the best in most people. Although sometimes time is appropriate, you have to consider that people have difficult weeks, sometimes difficult months.

New rules require adjustment. And y'all, let me just say that not every mistake deserves a formal co formal conversation. It goes back to your children. Do you point out every single mistake that they make? I mean, that would be a beatdown.

Okay, so not every mistake deserves a formal conversation. Other times, giving it time to giving in to time is avoidance.

It's just avoidance wearing fancier clothes.

So the management work that we do is knowing the difference and being able to act once you see the difference.

Another another issue that hiring brought into focus. there was a lot. But that was authority. It's easy to give somebody some responsibility for an outcome while you're the one keeping control of every decision that affects it. Like we tell her that she owns the client experience, the project or the design or whatever it is, but she still has to return to us for approval at every meaningful point.

Now, don't get me wrong, when you're training somebody, yes, this is where you're training them to meet your expectations.

But if they're they're into their tenure and we tell her that she owns the client experience, that project design or whatever we're talking about, and she still has to return to us for approval at every meaningful point.

Well, if something goes wrong, we're holding her accountable. If she makes this decision independently, we may question why she didn't ask.

But nobody does her best work for very long inside that contradiction.

So in the design firm today, I'm not doing the design work. Juliana's the one leading all the projects. She's she's got some help, but I get to review what she's developed, offer my opinion, question something, or say that a direction might need another pass, and then she works it out. But I'm not the one redesigning the room while pretending that I delegated it. And she's not even waiting until she can extract the final answer from me. It is more of a collaboration.

And that that arrangement I I feel like I did a good job with my previous employees, Debbie and Megan. They were my lead designers. I I've had others, but those were the two key key. And

I I practiced a lot. I practiced a lot on them. I'd say Juliana's getting the best of me. But the arrangement that we have now, it took more than handing her a list of design tasks. Right? And it also is that I'm hiring people better at design than I ever was, or that I even wanted to be. So it it this this new

Arrangement has required me to accept that my experience can remain available to the work without making me the person who personally solved every design question.

Because there's a difference between offering perspective and taking the work back. I would it would suffocate her if she couldn't run with her creativity.

So the goal is that I can help a talented designer sharpen her thinking.

Other compared to teaching her that ownership is temporary and every answer still belongs to me. And this is crossing over into into business decisions as well.

So I had to become more comfortable with a capable decision that is not the precise decision I would have made.

If it serves the client, protects the project, meets the standard, and supports the overall design or the overall running of the company, it does not need to be a replica of my brain or my thought process.

Y you cannot grow your firm into the strength of pe of its people if the owner treats every difference between her and the people, if she treats it as a defect.

Now, the accountability the accountability does not disappear. If the client experience suffers or a project loses money, then I cannot point to delegation as though it removed my responsibility. As the owner of the company, I still remain responsible.

That's the joy and the pain of being the owner of the company.

That's why delegation needs checkpoints, clear standards, and a shared understanding of which decisions require consultation.

Because y'all the answer is not constant supervision. It is simply enough structure that the person can move confidently and enough communication that the owner is not surprised by something consequential.

This reminds me recently of Genevieve, my daughter. We just had second grade pictures. Okay. She has enough structure that she can move confidently.

When she wakes up and gets dressed, she knows it's picture day.

She comes downstairs and she's wearing a t-shirt. And it's a it's it's a it's a t-shirt. It is not a cute graphic t-shirt with a butterfly on it. It's a t-shirt she got from a camp two years ago. So the white's not so white. You can't see the whole image in the in the photo. Okay. But but here's the thing.

She made that decision. Okay. I was not surprised. It was not something consequential. She didn't come down and decide she wanted to go into the photos without a top. Okay. So she has enough structure. She can move confidently and she's got enough communication. She knew it was picture day.

It's the same thing with your team. Okay. So maybe she's maybe your designer's going with a light sky blue instead of a dark navy blue. Okay. The the the communication is in place. That's not constant supervision. The owner can contribute where her judgment adds value without becoming the place that every decision goes to weight. And what I mean by that is that Genevieve made the decision.

I don't have to be up there laying her clothes out. Some moms might have sent her back upstairs to change. I want her to know that you know what, some decisions I don't need to get in and change. So again, this is going back to work instead of me just laughing about my kids' school pictures because we just got them in the mail. yeah. We're gonna remember second grade. But

Coming back to the point, one of the clearest ways that I can see the difference between how I operated at first and how I operate now is that at first too much lived in my head, and the team often had to come back to me because there was nowhere else for that answer to live. Now I

And much more intentional about defining the process. Okay, we have our, we have our, we call them the 16 steps of sanity. They have substeps, they have sub-substeps. So the process has been defined. We've documented the the key elements that matter, and we make it clear who's responsible. And there's a timeline attached to it. I'm back to my management standards that I already understood, y'all. But

I actually started applying them to the company that had my name on it. It's like it it's it's not rocket science. It's not rocket science. But there is a risk in this kind of reflection. And it's especially for owners who take responsibility seriously. We can keep turning the problem back on ourselves long after the evidence is clear. We improve the rule.

We document the process, we train, we give direct feedback, we provide support, we adjust the workload. And still there are times when the work does not improve, commitments are not kept, deadlines are missed.

The or I don't know, maybe the person just does not want what the role actually requires. And you have to admit and face up to it that sometimes the person is not right for the role. And that sucks, right? But it's part of leadership too.

I don't believe, and this this episode is not like the I don't think that the purpose of examining our own weaknesses is to make the owner responsible for every failed hire. We have to remove the emotion, but it's also not always to point at the other person. The purpose is to make a fair assessment.

What responsibility belonged to the company? What responsibility belonged to my leadership? And what responsibility belonged to that employee?

Once the expectations were clear and support was provided, what happened next?

what happened next is the key contributor because a person who needs clarity may improve when she receives it. A person who needs more training may become may become more capable with practice.

A person who continues the same pattern after clear expectation, support, and direct feedback is giving you different information as the owner. People can be talented, good, and deeply likable without being right for a particular role.

The role itself can also be so poorly constructed that almost no one would succeed in it.

A mature leader has to be able to hold both possibilities without choosing whichever answer feels emotionally easier.

I tried to bring somebody in to help me navigate all the craziness in my businesses. I have ML Interiors Group. I have the Design Bakehouse, which is the coaching business. I have Studio Works, which is our studio, but it's also a co-working space for other creatives. I have Sidemark, which is the marketing and soon-to-be operational.

Software company. And then, of course, I have this podcast. I needed help. I basically needed a work wife. And I had two really wonderful, intelligent, beautiful human beings try to take that role on. But y'all.

my definition of what I needed would not allow her to s that that role was so poorly constructed that almost nobody would succeed in it. And and that was on me. And keeping somebody in a role that she cannot or will not perform eventually becomes its own leadership failure. All right. So as I tried to keep them, tried to say

Come on, I know you can do this. I know you can do this. But what happened is that other employees absorb the work. Okay. And if if if you're not like, let's talk about a designer or somebody who's impacting, like this role was not client-facing, but in some instances, depending on the role we're discussing, client experience is gonna suffer. They can, they can feel the inconsistency.

And and if you keep this person in a situation where she cannot succeed, that's on you. Everybody knows. She knows it. You know it.

Ending the employment relationship does everybody a favor. Okay. Now, it shouldn't be casual. It should suck. Okay. I think letting somebody go is one of the hardest things of being a business owner.

So it shouldn't be casual, but it should not be postponed indefinitely simply because the owner does not want to feel like the bad person.

The the kindest arrangement is not the one that preserves the current outcome. No, wait. The kindest outcome is not the one that preserves the current arrangement. It's the one that tells the truth. And what it does is it allows both the person and the business to move forward. It gives you both the freedom.

tying all of this together about what I know now, looking back. And this this has not been this has not been a pleasant experience to put this podcast episode together. looking back has been really hard. But it's been a great exercise, probably one I should have done before. it is a lot of these podcast episodes are what I know instinctually.

literally putting them into words. So let's say what I know now is that hiring is not simply a way to purchase more capacity, it is a commitment to lead.

This person that you hire may bring experience, initiative, and talent.

But she's still entering this business with its own clients, its own history, standards, and likely some unwritten assumptions.

It is my responsibility to make as much of that visible as I reasonably can.

And this is ongoing. Okay. What it meant for me before is returning to what I already knew. Standards, then they must be stated. Responsibilities need to be clear. Processes, they they need to be documented. Follow through cannot depend on whether I happen to remember something that day. y'all.

Feedback needs to happen while it can still be useful. And authority has to accompany the responsibility that I ask somebody to carry. So if somebody makes a decision that I don't agree with, does it impact the business? Does it impact the client? If so, how much?

If feedback is necessary, if it can be useful, it needs to be timed while it's still useful. Going back to my, something that I I think a lot of you can relate to is your children. If Genevieve does something on Tuesday in school, she gets written up and punished at school.

And then I talk to her on Saturday about it and punish her by tell telling her she can't watch cartoons in the morning. that that's not still useful. Feedback needs to happen while it can still be useful. But

Your employee still has to have authority to accompany the responsibility that I'm asking her to carry. So I am certainly not suggesting that I now manage every situation perfectly or or that I mother perfectly. Okay. I just I can relate the two. and and I certainly wish I could say, but it doesn't carry the case that documentation has removed every misunderstanding.

Y'all, businesses are made of people and people remain complicated. Yourself included, myself included. But what has changed is that I no longer pretend that I need more information when the answer is a management practice that I already understand. I know what to do, and now I do the work. I also no longer assume that the team, but that a team problem tells me only something about the team.

I let it ask something of me. So turning it back, you can't point, you can't point one finger without the other three pointing back at you. Okay. So I have to ask myself: is the standard clear? Does the process support the work? Have I said what needs to be said? Have I given the person room to make the decision? Have I given them too much room to make the decision? So if the answer to these questions are yes.

And the problem continues, then I can address the person or the fit with much more confidence. girl, the process, you're not following it. Have I told you about this issue before? Absolutely. Chop chop. Okay. Or the answer could be no. Does the process support the work? No, actually, we need to rewrite part of the process.

And that is a much more useful place for me to lead than from intuition. Okay, that turns into fruit frustration. And let me tell you, my my I I'd like to say that my team, whether it was Debbie or Megan or gosh, Sarah or Erica.

Lori.

my gosh, Kelsey. there's there's there's been a handful over the years, y'all. I I think that they would say that this has been fairer to everybody involved. Of course, Juliana, she's still with me. So if you're frustrated with someone on your team right now, I I'm gonna suggest step back from the question of whether she's a good employee or a bad employee. Look at the role, not the person.

Look at the role as it actually exists. And then step back and say, what has been made clear?

What authority does she have? What feedback has she received? And what support has been provided?

If if there's a gap, you've got some work to do. If you have addressed all of this, then look honestly at what has happened since it has been defined, the support has been provided.

Most of the time the person probably needs better direction.

You might discover that the business actually needs a better role.

Or does the maybe the role needs a different person? these are the different solutions that you can look at.

And the answer will not always be comfortable, but clarity gives you somewhere useful to begin.

you might not like the answer, but you have the answer. That should give you some relief.

There have been times where I was too close to a team situation to tell what my problem was. So for you, if you're too close to a team situation to tell whether you have a people problem, a role problem, a leadership problem, this is the kind of work that I do in private coaching. Because we can look at what's been happening in your firm. I can help you separate the facts from the frustration, decide what needs to be clarified, changed.

Or maybe finally addressed.

Maybe you need standardized processes and a place to document them.

You'll find all of the coaching information in the show notes. So this is the part that nobody warned me about. And I might not have tied it up neatly in this episode. or with my team. That there have been some messy conversations and messy situations. So while I may not have tied it up neatly, give yourself permission, you may not either.

Okay. But I hope that me saying these things out loud has helped you.

At least recognizing that you're not alone. So if you're in the middle of your own version of this, give yourself a little bit of room to look at it before you rush to turn it into a lesson.

And in this series, I will meet you back here next time for another part that nobody warned us about.

So that is the part that nobody warned me about. I may not have tied it up neatly and you may not either, but these are the things that are worth saying out loud.

I'll see you next time.