Manager or Control Freak, Which Are You?

Now, you should be warned, if you are a conventional thinker and resistant to change then this article will most likely either fly directly over your head or just make your teeth itch!

About ten years ago I made a defining life decision, I wrote down that 'I want to wake up every day, do the things I love and make enough money to get by'

A fairly simple request to the universe, where the hardest part was in hindsight working out what you actually love to do, that part took best part of two years.

Now I am going to fast forward to the present day, but for those of you who want to know the abridged history of the 'What' I invite you to digest a summarised version 'Stormology' The History Behind the Show' and for those of you more interested in the nitty gritty of the 'How' I will simply point you in the direction of an amazing guy called Tim Ferris and suggest you cancel everything in your schedule and devour his book 'The Four Hour Work Week'.

Today, I run a company where I get up practically everyday, do inspiring things I love, working with likeminded people. So what does a typical day look like?

Each day I wake, what time? well, when I wake, my body is quite capable of telling me when it has had enough rest, I don't do alarm clocks unless I have a flight to catch or something of that ilk.

Then I commute to my office, via the coffee machine, a distance of approximately 30 metres.

Next, I take a look at my 'To Do' list, then I pick something from the list that I am in the mood for, quite an easy task when the type of work you do is stuff you love, note paragraph two of this article.

Wait! I hear you cry, that all sounds great, but you are the boss of the company! What about the people who work for you?

Firstly, nobody works for me, everybody works with me, big attitude difference and yes the same rules pretty much apply to everyone in the company, they all work from where they want, they work the hours that they want, on the days that they want and do the thing that they fancy doing according to the mood they are in, the only two caveats to those rules are as follows;

Is there something that needs doing that is holding up one of your colleagues?

Is there something that needs doing that is now on a deadline for a paying client?

Bottom line is, if you cannot trust the people who you have employed to get on with the stuff that you hired them to do and complete it professionally, then you don't have a management problem, you have an HR problem.

The mindset that people will produce more or better output by forcing them to waste hours of their day commuting to an office so you and other colleagues can be in the same physical space as them is in my opinion as mad as a bucket of frogs!

Technology should be YOUR slave.

We live in a world which has practically every tool you could imagine to free our time, and yet, most of us have become slaves to the technology.

We use technology as our slave, here are our hardest working tech tools.

It is of course a subject that deserves its own blog post, but in brief, the principal business tools we use to make our world possible are;

Evernote Every note of everything shared with everyone, everywhere available on every device at anytime.

Skype: Free phone calls, chat etc.

Zoom: Our Virtual Meeting room, also can be used to host webinars.

Dropbox: Shared Cloud Storage

Upwork: Hire Freelancers to get everything done... NOW!

If you aspire to manage people then I suggest an attitude change will help, people don't actually want managers or bosses, they want leaders, give people direction and then leave them the hell alone to go for it, be there if they need help and assistance, give them the best tools to help them achieve their task as easily as possible, but most importantly create a cool work environment not a hierarchy.

Every person you work with has one thing which is of more value to them then any amount of money or any amount of adulation, their time!

"Value peoples time above all else, guard your own vigorously" - Mark Bellinger