3 Tips To Build Your Team's Independence in 2025
I want to share one of the most underrated professional goals I’ve ever set. Here it is:
Develop my team well enough that I can take an uninterrupted 2 week vacation.
Truly.
And given the responses I got to How to Elevate from Manager to Director+, now feels like the right time to share my favorite tips for building a team’s independence and self-sufficiency.
When you have a self-sufficient team:
They perform well (individually & collectively)
They leverage their resources
They’re more empowered
They’re more engaged
You gain back bandwidth
You’re positioned for expanded scope
You take uninterrupted vacations
My favorite 3 tips for getting out of the weeds and increasing independence within your team:
Letting go
Taking off the training wheels
Building resourcefulness
Letting Go
This is the simplest, yet the hardest.
It’s consciously relinquishing total control and details.
When you're an individual contributor, you have depth, and little breadth. Your knowledge needs to be a mile deep, but only inches wide.
When you’re leading a team, your breadth expands, so your depth needs to contract. Your purview shifts and you need to be a few feet deep, and a few yards wide. (PS - Depth and breadth will continue to need to shift as you move beyond the Manager level.)
But there’s a trap!
It feels good to know everything.
And that’s our ego talking - trying to convince us that the only way we have credibility with our people is if we’re in the trenches with them.
Your people don’t want you staying in the trenches with them. They need you dropping in to understand their challenges and then getting outside the trench to advocate for their needs and anticipate future challenges.
Want your team to be more self-sufficient? Start by examining what you need to let go of.
Taking Off The Training Wheels
If your team is not operating independently, there’s a good chance you haven’t taken off the training wheels.
Yes, I said it.
Common places where I see “training wheels” still exist beyond onboarding/ramping up into the role:
Asking to be cc’d
Attending client calls
Jumping in and taking over
Manager owning the 1:1 agenda
Speaking on their behalf (when they’re in the meeting)
All of these actions send a message that you don’t believe they’re ready.
They never will be if you don’t take off the training wheels.
Yes, they might fall.
Yes, they’ll likely make mistakes.
And yes, you’ll be there to help them up, coach them through what they’ve learned, and propel them forward once again.
Here are some of my favorite coaching questions to build my people up while also strengthening their decision making independence.
Building Resourcefulness
One of the biggest time sucks is answering the non-stop questions and pings from your people.
In the early days of management, it gave me a thrill. I loved feeling needed. I loved answering questions.
But if I’m always answering their questions:
a) I’m constantly being interrupted,
b) my bandwidth is shot, and
c) I’m not building their decision making.
Here are 3 things I did to pivot dynamics:
First, I started to shift from 1:1 support to 1:Many.
If I’m getting a question from Pat, it’s likely a similar question I’m going to get from Morgan, how can I move from answering it 1:1 each time to proactively answering it for many.
By adding a group element, they begin leveraging each other more and discover they are not alone in their thoughts or challenges.
Be quick to identify themes and trends within the questions you get, then start to bring those to team meetings, post them in your weekly summary emails, and watch how their teamwork and resourcefulness grows.
Bonus points if you begin to orchestrate peer to peer teaching opportunities.
Second, I connected people with resources.
So many questions have answers that can be found on internal docs, Slack channels, intranet, etc.
When I know the answer lives documented somewhere other than my head, I send them the link. And I’ll say something like this:
“Great question! I’m glad you’re asking. I’m also a believer in teaching you how to fish, not just giving you your dinner. :) So here’s a link where you’ll find the answer. Dive in and absolutely come back my way if you want to chat further nuances. My door is always open!”
The lazy thing to do is to ping someone and ask the question. We all do it.
A self-sufficient team isn’t afraid to look, digest, and then come with deeper, more nuanced questions. And those are the questions you want to spend your time on. Not the first level, surface question.
Third, I intentionally boosted their confidence.
A lot of questions come from lack of confidence, not lack of knowledge.
It’s my job to increase their confidence in their knowledge.
When a new hire is no longer a new hire, and/or I have a sense that they likely know the answer, I pivot how I respond.
It might sound like this:
“I like how you're thinking and I appreciate that you’ve asked. I also want to be transparent with you about what I’m going to start doing more with you. I believe you know more than you give yourself credit for. So you’re going to notice I’m going to begin answering your questions with questions. :) So for what you just asked about the fulfillment process, what does your gut tell you is the answer?”
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Increase your comfort with letting go, identify where you can take off the training wheels, and intentionally increase your team’s resourcefulness and you will start to see a more self-sufficient and independent team in 2025.
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Which of these tactics can you implement and boost self-sufficiency within your team?
Will you add this to your Q1 development goals for yourself?
Comment below with any questions or thoughts!
