Small Business Leadership Lessons: Be Worthless On Purpose

Drew Sutton Drew Sutton Leadership

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Why the best thing you can feel at work is worthless — twice a day.

This article is for you if you know you want to make it to the next level — you're ambitious enough to say I want to retire before I'm seventy-five — but you've missed every family dinner for the last six weeks, and you catch yourself grumbling that it's so hard to find good help these days.

Well. It turns out the key to making family dinner and the key to scaling your business are the same thing.

You've got to learn to feel worthless twice a day.

Now — I don't mean worthless like the guy who won't work. I mean worthless like the boss whose team doesn't need him.

If you just rolled your eyes — because you think being the best in your business is the key to your success — this probably isn't the article for you. Go wear yourself out. Antacids are on aisle two at Rite Aid.

But if you'd rather build a company that lets you take a two-week trip to the Bahamas, keep reading.

How in the world can being worthless build a company worth millions? Simple. Let me tell you how I discovered the power of being worthless.

I got the kind of shot you dream about: I built a brand-new division inside a Fortune 100 company. I scaled my team from two people to eighty in two years. Forty reporting to me directly, another forty on loan. I had a hard, technical project with a thousand moving parts. I owned everything from Finance to Fabrication, Software to Supply Chain, and everything in the middle. That's a lot of hiring, training, coordinating, and maintaining — and I learned a lot. That's a polite way of saying I stepped in my fair share of poo. Here's what I learned.

Scaling from from two people to about six, is a lot like being a solo operator with help. At that level, being the smartest guy in the room felt great. Notice I said felt, because my team certainly did not agree with me. By being the bottleneck, problems landed on my desk like rain, and I was the only one who could solve them. It was like being a great technician again, except I didn't have to waste my time uncovering the really hard challenges. Now other people were bringing the problems to me, and I could focus on being the problem-solving machine I was. It felt fantastic. It was also slow, exhausting, and very frustrating to my team.

Did my team tell me they felt that way? Heck no! I signed their check. They smiled to my face, grumbled behind my back, and complained to each other about how the boss was holding everything up.

By twelve people, the tension was starting to show. I spent the whole day solving everyone else's problems — badly — before I ever got to my own work. When we fell behind on work because a decision lagged, I worked more overtime, and made my team stay late to meet deadline slips I had caused. Dinner at home stopped happening. It started to wear on my wife and my kids.

By twenty-five direct reports, the math finally caught up with me. Every hour I spent solving one person's problem was an hour twenty-four other people spent standing in line, waiting for me to hear them out. Waiting for me to adjudicate, and send them on another "rock-finding" mission. I wasn't the boss. I was the bottleneck... and I was breaking down.

So I took three days off and rewrote how I lead. I made one rule.

From now on, I'll be the dumbest person on every team I lead.

That one decision changed everything. One month in, I couldn't believe the work my team was turning out. By month two, I was almost bored — I'd sit through a whole meeting with nothing to add. The work was already done — in many cases in half the time, and done better than I'd have done it. By month three, the hard problems were getting solved without me, ideas were flowing freely, my people were growing, and I was home for dinner with my grade-schoolers.

Then month four, I got twitchy. You can only keep an engineer away from the design so long before he breaks. The engineering motto is if it's not broken, add features, after all. So I'd sneak off, grab a juicy piece of engineering, and chew on it for two days — just to feel useful. Every single time, the fires came back. Deliverables slipped. The customer got hot, and we missed internal deadlines.

That's when it hit me. The emptiest I ever felt was the exact stretch my team ran the best. Not worthless because I wasn't doing my job. Worthless because there was nothing left for me to do — my people had already done everything I would have, without needing to ask. The empty feeling wasn't failure. It was the symptom of being a great boss. I felt worthless because I was doing my job.

So I made a second rule, the one this whole article is about.

Great Leaders Feel Worthless Twice a Day.

I've coached this everywhere since — nonprofits, the Air Force, government shops, other Fortune 100s, startups running on fumes. When people listen, they get promotions, profits rise, innovation flourishes, and morale climbs. It's worked so well that I can almost predict your profit margins by how important you are to your team.

If you don't feel worthless twice a day, you're sabotaging your own company.

Obviously I don't mean be worthless. No one likes a do-nothing. What I'm saying is feel worthless. Run a check, and run it often. Use it as a tool.

• How many times this week did I feel worthless?

• What's keeping me from it? Who do I need to train?

• Who's ready to grow?

• What could I buy that does the job for me?

Do that, and the company will get bigger while you get home earlier. That empty, worthless feeling? That's a business you can leave to your kids. It's the family vacations other people only dream about. It's retiring before they put you in a nursing home.

So start being worthless. Today. Because

Worthless leaders lead companies worth millions.

And if you're sitting there thinking this sounds amazing — but how do I actually get there? — the answer is you train your team to bring you solutions, not problems. But that's a whole article of its own. Stick around for the next one.