The Key to Avoiding CEO Burnout: Letting Go and Empowering Your Team
As CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, burnout often happens because we hold on too tightly to every area of the business. This habit makes sense when you’re first starting your business, especially if you’re doing it alone or with a partner. At that stage, you have to manage everything. But as your business starts scaling and you build a team, it becomes impossible to handle every detail on your own.
It’s like the scene from Alice in Wonderland where Alice starts off small with plenty of room in the house, but as she grows, her arms and legs push out of the windows and doors because the house can no longer contain her. As your business scales, it outgrows your ability to control everything. To successfully scale your business, you need to start relying on your team.
Here are some key points to keep in mind:
- Empower Your Team to Scale Your Business: One of the most critical steps in scaling a business is delegation. You need to let your team own their roles and responsibilities. Equip them with the right skills and trust them to manage key performance indicators (KPIs), which act as your business’s north star. When your team understands what they’re working toward and they have the autonomy to achieve those goals, they’ll take ownership and run with it.
- Let Go of Control to Avoid CEO Burnout: The more you try to control every aspect of your business, the more you risk burnout. Scaling your business requires you to trust your team. By doing so, you can free up your time to focus on business strategy, the bigger picture, and your personal life.
- Prioritize Self-Care for Long-Term Success: As a business owner, you often take care of everyone else before yourself, leading to burnout, stress, and even strained personal relationships. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. Delegating and trusting your team will allow you to step back, take care of yourself, and spend quality time with your family and loved ones.
In my own experience, I’ve learned that stepping back has allowed my team to grow faster. We now spend several months a year living in Mexico, and during that time, my team has continued to drive the business forward. In fact, we’ve seen greater growth since I started trusting my team and letting go. When you give yourself the space to step back, that’s when the big ideas come.
Scaling your business is not about trying to control everything; it’s about building a strong, empowered team that can take the reins. By letting go, you’ll not only scale faster, but you’ll also find balance in your life.
Apply for a deep-dive Scale Strategy Session dive with one of our high-level strategists. Your company must be generating a minimum of 500K to qualify. You will walk away with clear-cut steps to get your company from where you are now to where you want it to be. It’s a true gift to be able to take a look at the entire picture of your company, get clarity on your gaps and the strategies you need to close them and move forward.