Delegation vs Abdication: Why Your Spa Manager Is Frustrating You

Hiring new staff starts out as a plethora of opportunities for you, the spa & your new team member. But I see spa owners EXTREMELY frustrated when new staff keep dropping the ball or don't pick up the ball at all! May as well just do it all yourself, right?!

Nope. That's not what the problem is.

The problem is you may have confused delegating with abdicating.

Delegating: to entrust (a task or responsibility) to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself.

Abdicating: failure to fulfill a responsibility or duty.

As a busy spa owner, you may have great intentions to delegate to your new manager, but if you haven't set her up to succeed with an in-depth management training system, you are abdicating her future achievements.

This isn't meant to place blame, but rather to clarify why you and your manager are frustrated with each other. It's not that you missed some weird quirk of theirs in the interview...you missed something in their onboarding, training, and ongoing support.

In his book The eMyth, Michael Gerber writes...

There's a critical moment in every business when the owner hires his very first employee to do the work he doesn't know how to do himself, or doesn't want to do... And in a single stroke, you suddenly understand what it means to be in business in a way you never understood before. ‘I don't have to do that anymore!' At last you're free. The Manager in you wakes up and the Technician temporarily goes to sleep. Your worries are over. Someone else is going to do that now. But at the same time — unaccustomed as you are to being The Manager — your new found freedom takes on an all too common form. It's called Management by Abdication rather than by Delegation. In short, like every small business owner has done before you, you hand the books over to Harry...and run.

Sound familiar? It did for me too, many years ago.

Watch the rest of this weeks tip below. Need the volume off? No problem, there's closed captioning to follow along.

Referenced: 
1. FREE December Webinar: 3 Spa Systems for Consistent Client Attraction, Satisfaction & Retention
2.  Spa Business Profit Labs: Starts Jan 3rd

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