Empowerment in Leadership: The Magic of Delegating and Trusting Others

On the 14th of February, 2005 a small video sharing website launched. Nearly twenty years later youtube.com is the most watched video site in the world.

When it was launched, there was no one thinking that they wanted to be a YouTuber and now, it is the beginning of the retirement of the first very successful YouTubers.

One very successful YouTuber is Marques Brownlee, better known for his tech review YouTube channel MKBHD. Recently he put up a video on his thoughts about the challenge of being a YouTuber and the decisions for some of the people retiring.

I watch him for my tech reviews so I am glad he isn’t retiring.

He discussed how he thought being a creator was like being an athlete, that you work really hard for no reward for years and then suddenly you have success and this creating turns into a business.

His analogy is that of being an octopus, having many tentacles or arms.

Once you become successful you have to not only create but do sales, marketing, content deals, video planning, and on and on.

Now you have many arms, doing many things, and most of them are not the actual creating, which is what you wanted to do the whole time.

Brownlee said to grow his channel he had to hire people to do the things he was not as good at, he described it as cutting off his arms.

Cut Off Your Arms

The athlete analogy is accurate, but what he didn’t raise was that YouTubers went from being a single person to forming a business and in that process, they have to give up control to people more skilled in different areas.

As the leader of your team, you need to know which arms are your strongest. Where do you have the most skill, and expertise, and add the most value?

You want to keep these arms.

The other arms, you want to cut off.

Let someone else be the best at Excel, or research, or stacking the dishwasher or whatever things are required in your environment. Everything else, let them go.

Not just let them go, double down on the things you are great at. Be even better at them.

It doesn’t matter that people have better skills in areas where you are not strong, that is the whole point of having a team.

Everyone’s ability should support and reinforce others’ skills.

It is addition by subtraction, cut off those arms.