Savvy businesspeople are always seeking ways to save time or effort. Yet becoming a better boss requires more of both—no shortcuts. Here are 7 strategies to step up your leadership game.
Create opportunities for employees to grow.
“To help an employee grow, you first have to put yourself in their shoes. What’s going to motivate them to do their best at work? My name may be on the door, but I don’t want them to feel like they’re doing this for me. They should be doing this for the organization and for themselves. You want people to develop and grow with your firm, but I also explain to them, ‘If circumstances lead you down a different path tomorrow, what can I do to help you make sure that the time that you spent here means something on your resume?’ So one, what drives you to get up and come to work every day? And two, what do you want to learn?
I have a self-assessment that allows team members to track their own growth, which is the basis of our annual reviews. Especially in smaller firms, you often don’t have that type of structure—people come to work and have to wing it, and it can be hard to know if you’re doing a good job. But if you can tell me where you want to be, I can also help you map out a possible path and give you a tool to constantly assess yourself. That allows you to hold yourself accountable for the thing that you say you want to do. So if you’re a junior designer who wants to become a senior designer, I can also give you the self-assessment form for the senior designer. Because you know what’s expected of that role, you can ask me for opportunities—maybe you want a chance to be more front-facing with the clients, or to sit in on more conversations to see how I communicate with the client, or how I structure a proposal, or how I decide whether we’re going to take a project or not. We won’t sit down every month and say, ‘What have we checked off of this assessment list?’ I’m only holding you accountable for the things I hired you to do; you’re holding yourself accountable for what you said you want to become. But I’m giving you the tools to come to the table saying, ‘I can perform all of these tasks listed for this senior designer role—will you give me a try?’” —Erika Ward, Erika Ward Interiors, Atlanta
Let your team run the show.
“I don’t like managing people—I’ll say that out loud. I have to hire self-starters, otherwise it does not work. If I’m gone for a couple of days on an out-of-state install or a job site visit, I need a team that can make progress without me. I’m not a micromanager; everyone needs to keep going and hit the deadlines. I tell my team, ‘Run it like you’re my boss. When design meetings have to happen, schedule time with me so that we can do the furniture plan.’ At first I thought maybe that wasn’t a good approach, but I’ve found that a lot of employees actually want to control all that because it gives them autonomy with their time.
It’s also super important to have my team come in blossoming with ideas, so I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to foster that creativity. I check in with them a lot, asking, ‘How are you doing? How’s your workload?’ Most of the time, it’s great. But sometimes it’s like, ‘Nope, I’m bursting at the seams.’ It’s a small business, and we all work in the same space, so you can tell right away if someone comes in and they’re edgy. For me, it’s worth it to say, ‘Take the day and go to the beach tomorrow.’ Does that person come back totally refreshed the next day? I wouldn’t say totally. But it helps.” —Raili Clasen, Raili CA Design, Corona Del Mar, California
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
“Having flexibility was huge for me when I was working for someone else. Things happen—I’ve been a single mom juggling two kids and a full-time design career, and something as small as saying ‘I need to work from home today because my son is home sick’ would irritate my boss. I remember thinking: If you’re getting quality work from me and the clients are happy, who cares? It’s so much more important to focus on the work that people are producing, not the small inconveniences or interferences.
When I left and opened my own firm, that was fundamental in my business. That’s how I interact with my employee, but that’s also my approach for the entire project. When something happens, it’s important to take a beat and ask yourself, ‘Is this really a big deal?’ Think about how this is affecting everything else—on the small scale in this moment, and on the larger scale of the project as a whole. It’s important to give people a space where mistakes can be made, and the whole team can learn from them.” —Miquel Purser, Purser Interiors, Charlotte
Know when to lead and when to follow.
“When I was working in hospitality design, I had a mentor who instilled in me that one of the most powerful elements of leadership is knowing when to step back and let your team lead—and when to step up when your voice needs to be heard. There’s not a formula to getting it right; it’s instinctual and gut driven. I’m a talker. So for me, it’s a lot of catching my own behavior in the moment. It comes down to self-awareness.
The reward, ultimately, is seeing your team grow in incremental ways over the years—seeing the wins and watching them blossom. You don’t get a ‘best boss’ certificate or ribbon or medal. You don’t get a pat on the back. It’s just something that you move through—and that forward motion is my marker of success. But in the moment, the most important part is knowing that you don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room. Sometimes, just being in the room is enough.” —Matt Donahoe, Bureau Interior Design, Nashville
Recognize hard work.
“People really respond to appreciation. I got more mindful of that when I had kids, and it carried over into my work: I try to acknowledge something that’s good on the spot. If I’m looking at a [well-done] spreadsheet that somebody’s put together, I’m quick to say, ‘This is awesome and thorough—thank you so much.’ It’s also never too late to say thank you. Last week, we had a long day at a client’s house doing a mini install, and my employees were great. When I got home, I sent a text: ‘Thank you—you were awesome.’ We all like to hear ‘thank you’ and ‘job well done.’
I try to show my appreciation in other ways, too. Tomorrow is my design assistant’s one-year anniversary at the firm, so she’s getting a bonus and a raise, and I’ve got pedicures at a spa booked for us, then I’m taking her out to lunch. I give informal bonuses several times a year as well, like, ‘Hey, we’ve been running hard, and I noticed that you have really been on top of X, Y or Z, so thank you.’ You have to understand the finances of your business to make this [approach] work, because you’re never going to be comfortable writing checks when you’re operating in uncertainty. But I think sprinkling in those moments of appreciation throughout the year is really wonderful for people. I’ve worked for firms where you get an end-of-year bonus based on numbers, and the tension leading up to that—trying to figure out what the profit was so you know how much money you’re going to have for Christmas—is just not the environment that I am interested in fostering. A less-structured system, where a bonus is less of a commission built into the compensation range and more of a true bonus, feels more natural and sincere to me.” —Lily Brown, Lily Brown Interiors, Savannah, Georgia
Get comfortable delegating.
“I was so afraid of being bossy that I couldn’t delegate. I don’t like to tell people what to do, but thinking that way caused me to do more work than I needed to do. I’d be like, ‘Oh, no worries, I’ll take care of it. You have a good weekend.’ But then I’d stress over it all weekend, right? I hired employees to take things off my plate, but because I wasn’t delegating, they weren’t clear about their roles, positions or the expected deliverables—and because of that, they could never really be successful. In turn, I was afraid to delegate more because the deliverables they were giving me weren’t exactly what I wanted. All that time, I was thinking they were the problem—but the problem was actually that I did not assign a clear deliverable.
I had to find a system so that I could delegate without feeling like I was bossing my team around, and so that they didn’t feel like they were being bossed. For us, the answer was the task-based software system Asana, where I documented all of the tasks that were needed, created departments to oversee different tasks, and then assigned them to the team members in those departments. That way, it was clear that the task was a part of their job. It’s not, ‘DuVäl asked you for this.’ No, the system asks you for it. Once I started to list the process and the systems, I also listed the deliverable: what it should look like, what the font should be, what the email should sound like.
Now, whenever we have a problem, I don’t ever have to point a finger and say, ‘Hey, you did something wrong.’ Asana plays the middleman, and I can always go back to the task or the criteria documented in the system and say, ‘Hey, where in that process did we fail?’ When the task, the deliverable and the due date are very clear, I’ve found that the system takes care of everything you would ever want to micromanage. It’s been a lifesaver for me.” —DuVäl Reynolds, DuVäl Design, Fairfax, Virginia
Lead by example.
“I started my career in the Walmart merchandiser trainee program, where I had so many leadership opportunities. But honestly, the way I learned the most was by sitting in a cubicle next to my boss, who included me in every meeting and kept her phone on speaker. It was learning by osmosis. Now I have an intern, and I’ve trained her that same way. Whether it’s a client following up on an invoice or me calling a vendor to check on an order, she hears how I handle tricky situations, from the questions I ask to the tone I use. When I finish, we’ll sometimes talk about the calls—if it’s a tough conversation with a client, or maybe we’ve made a mistake, we talk about that and there’s no shame. I’m always quick to point out when I’ve made a mistake and own it, and when she hears that, I think she’s learning a lot about me and my integrity, but she’s also learning about leadership.
She also goes to all of my meetings. We had a big presentation last week, and she was in the room taking notes while I was doing the pitch. That means she has to learn the nuances of how to represent my firm in the most professional way. For one meeting, she walked up with her iced coffee and I was like, ‘Hey, let’s keep that in the car.’ You don’t know those sorts of things until someone tells you—that maybe you shouldn’t bring your 24-ounce drive-through coffee into this meeting, or that you should spit out your gum. Learning that early will prepare her to step up when the time comes.
One thing I’ve found is that when I pour [effort] into someone in this way, I get so much more in return. She feels empowered to follow up with those clients, or to reach back out to this builder or to call that rep about an order—she’s comfortable doing those things because she’s heard the conversations. As I’ve given her more opportunities to grow, I’m able to feel more confident giving her more responsibility. —Betsy Soos, Proximity Interior Design, Bentonville, Arkansas
omepage image: Erika Ward combined shiny marble and striking grained wood for a custom floor in a client’s entry | Rustic White