written by Award Winning Coach Nick Roud.
Why is it so hard for many to let go? What drives us to want to keep control over many things in our lives, least of all in our leadership capacity. The word control can conjure up many different emotions I know for myself it can at times be that I don’t trust a person or worry that what I am asking will not be done. It is an ongoing work on for me to let people in, people far smarter than me. With my ability to step back and allow others to take control of their expertise I have noticed a couple of things, firstly I grow my own knowledge and views and secondly that it’s ok to let others ‘do’.
Just to be clear that coaching and these weekly articles will only ever be done by me 🙂 I am happy to let control of a few things in my business but these two little puppies are all mine, they fill me up, they allow me to express, they allow me to be where I was put on this earth to do. What is interesting is this, as I have allowed others in (and this is a small group) my time has become more consistent towards the things that light me up. I was speaking with a client yesterday here in the global headquarters aka 20ft shipping container and he was so short of time. As we started to talk confidential I asked Sam (not his real name) how many hours do you have in your day, 24 he quickly replied, so do I, where do you spend your time across those 24 hours I asked…………I do not know Nick!
So his mission and he has excepted it is to simply log where his time goes each and every day. Now I don’t ask him to complete a 6min intinery of his day but blocks, could be home, friends, study, exercise, sleep, food, meetings etc. You see once you have come to the realisation that you can’t control everything (nor should you) you can control where you focus your time. Time is the biggest enabler when it comes to focusing on control. As you read this blog today step back for one second and ask yourself – who controls my time? If the answer is others then you might want to look at it in some detail.
Control can mean many things and as we know it’s easier to do it myself isn’t it! Well I would like to challenge you my friend on that. If you are fortunate enough to have staff and people around you who are able to support/help/take on then your duty of care isn’t to ‘do it all yourself’ that will only get you so far and quit possible to an early grave and we don’t want that. No your job is to coach, educate, help others try, grow, develop so your time and their time can be spent where it should be.
Over the years I have coach a GM of Sales, he is also on the Board of the company, we spoke about how he is the handbrake, he gets in the way of many things in production. I called him the seagull because when I spoke to the production team and asked how does Peter (not his real name) support your area the feedback was horrendous, ‘he comes in here and takes over’, ‘he pisses us off with his tone’, ‘he believes he know best’ etc. What I heard was simply he would come into the production areas take a big dump and then let everyone else clean up his messs. Remembering what he was there to do! Sales and lead that team…………..Over the months we worked together on how he could use his massive production brain to educate and help others rather than trying to do everything himself, he learnt how to ask open questions not ‘you need to do this or that’ and the vibe across the production and to that extent sales improved. Recently due to pressure on large international orders Peter has slipped back into old habits or as I like to say the eagle has returned! Much to his amusement- he gets it – he knows what he is doing – but he can’t let go of control. He can by the way it’s just he isn’t having those same open questions that he did so well across the back end of 2025. A slight slip up is ok with me but carrying on doing dumb things is a huge no no.
Controlling others is also a pretty narcissist behaviour. More importantly think about manipulation. I was blown away recently by a very senior executive who I was coaching at a French University, the topic was on Leadership and follow-ship thru the lens of Hitler! Trust me a very controversial session and one I was really dreading. This CE stood up in front of a number of other international CEOs and said Nick, leadership is about manipulation, ‘getting people to do things you want’ and promptly sat back down. The room fell into a rare quiet space, you couldn’t hear a penny drop, what felt like an eternity I sat forward and said well team you have just hear a view from Simon (not his real name) thoughts. The conversation was rich, fascinating and enlightening – the general views were that to lead you need followship and at times you need to name it/call it out and get on with things. This room full of CEOs didn’t mix their words. One lady said its how you frame it, if you can allow the person to think he/she has come up with the idea then we are progressing, others said it was more about aligning things to specific people because you know they will deliver etc. Anyway a fascinating conversation and one that flowed into dinner that evening. Manipulation sounds horrendous but think about it yourself for one moment and consider how you go about leading specifically when under pressure – do you do what Peter does, shit everywhere and leave everything in a mess? Do you try and do everything yourself ‘because its seems to be quicker and easier to do it yourself’ or do you manipulate others?
There is no right or wrong way, the purpose of today’s blog is to consider letting go of control. If you scored yourself 1-5 with 5 being I control everything and 1 being nothing to see here how would you score yourself and then go out into your organisations and teams and ask them the same very question and to score you on control. See how similar or different the results are.
A great test might be to sit in the passenger seat of a car and let someone else drive, what do you notice about yourself?
So What Are The Warning Signs?
- Feeling you are doing everything
- Not enough time to do your own job
- Frustration on speed of progress
- Not in your ‘typical’ flow
- Hard to see the wood for the tree
- Not spending time on things outside of work
Control comes in many shapes and sizes how we evolve should be left to this is how I have always done things. Evolution is about trying new ways, understanding what triggers you, what works and how best to progress forwards.
To wrap up, control must be for the detriment of progress, control is a waste of energy, great leaders bring others together and monitor progress or things getting in the way.
Nick, Award Winning Leadership Coach
