The Problem Starts When You Hit 10 Employees
Most business owners start by doing everything themselves, then hire people and delegate directly. That works until roughly 10 employees. Beyond that, you cannot manage everyone—you are too busy answering questions, coaching, and holding people accountable. That is when you need supervisors. But many owners never stop giving tasks to everyone directly, and that is where the trouble begins.
Bypassing Supervisors Creates Chaos
Here is the scenario: You walk the floor, hear about a problem, and tell the employee to fix it. Seems efficient—but you just bypassed their supervisor. Now the employee prioritizes your directive over their supervisor’s, the supervisor does not know how the employee is spending their time, and accountability falls apart. I have seen employees with two bosses exploit the gap—telling each boss they are busy with the other’s work—creating a 30% margin of unproductive time that nobody catches.
The Supervisor May Know Something You Do Not
There may be a reason the supervisor has not addressed the issue you spotted. Maybe a software update would cause conflicts across multiple machines. Maybe there are dependencies you are not aware of. When you jump in and direct the front-line employee, you risk overriding decisions the supervisor made for good reasons.
The Better Approach
Tell the employee: “Great ideas—go talk to your supervisor about this, and I will fill them in too.” Let the supervisor be part of the decision and implementation. This is hard for owners who are used to solving problems on the spot, and I need to be reminded of it regularly. But if you do not respect the chain of command as your company grows, chaos results.
Video Transcript
Why Should Business Owners Avoid Assigning Tasks to Most Employees?
Here is the scenario. Often business owners start a company and they are doing everything at first and then they hire more employees and they start assigning tasks because that is what you need to do as a business owner. There is the old saying “Delegate and elevate.” In other words, delegate tasks so you can focus on more important or higher-value tasks. But what happens often is as a company grows beyond 10 employees, the company needs supervisors for those employees because one person will have difficulty managing substantially more than 10 employees. For example, if you have 30 people reporting to you, you are not going to get any work done because you are going to be so distracted with bonding to questions from the 30 people that report to you and trying to hold them accountable and having regular meetings and coaching them and training them. So typically, at about 10 employees, give or take three, a business owner will have one person start supervising some employees. Typically, it is going to be the more entry-level employees that get supervised.
The Need for Supervisors in a Growing Company
But imagine you now have a company with 20 employees, and let’s say the business owner has two key people that provide supervision. What often happens is the business owner never gets out of the mode of giving tasks to everybody. The business owner still walks around the company, and talks about, “Hey, what is going on in your business?” And that is great. Business owners should hear from the front lines from the employees who are actually doing the work, how is it going, what challenges you are facing, and what problems you are facing. That is what makes a business owner great. But often, what happens then is the business owners start solving problems presented by the employee and assigning the employee tasks associated with that solution. So, for example, the employee might say, “Hey, when we run these widgets through the machine, the machine has a bunch of errors,” and the business owner says, “Oh, is the machine running the latest software version?” The employee says, “I don’t know.” And the owner says, “Hey, why don’t you go check the software version and see if there is an update available? And if there is, put that update in because that might fix the problems coming out of the machine.” Why is that a problem? Because you are bypassing the employee’s supervisor, and it creates a lot of confusion. It creates confusion for the employee because they are now trying to make the business owner happy, and they do not have a clear chain of command. The employee often will put greater weight on what the business owner says and less weight on what the supervisor says. And that now creates a conflict and it weakens the supervisor’s ability to manage that employee.
Here is another reason why that is unhelpful. The supervisor of the employee now is not aware of how the employee is spending their time and what they are doing. And so that supervisor is going to have a hard time holding that employee accountable. I remember working for basically two bosses. And I observed that neither one knew everything I was doing, and if I wanted to be an unethical employee and I saw some employees that were, I could have just said “Hey” to this boss, “I am busy with this other boss’s tasks” and vice versa. And that could create a margin of 30% of my time where I am not doing work for either because neither could hold me accountable. I have seen many employees who have multiple bosses and this becomes an efficiency problem. So I think it is very important to have one supervisor who knows everything that the employees are doing.
There is another reason why the owner should not be giving direction to front-line employees. And that is because there might be a reason why the supervisor had that employee doing something that the owner is not aware of. For example, let’s say with this hypothetical that the employee is asked by the owner to go look for updated software for the machine. Well, there might be another reason why the supervisor had not updated that. It might be because the update includes other changes that would cause more problems for the machine. It might be that the supervisor needed to update multiple machines at once to avoid conflict in the software. There may be a lot of considerations. And so, although owners are very used to telling employees what to do and trying to solve problems, and of course, they are doing it with great intention. The owner is harming their own business if they are delegating tasks or giving responsibility to employees who are responsible to somebody else. The far better approach is to tell the employee, “Hey these are great ideas. Thanks for problem-solving this with me. Why don’t you go talk to the supervisor about this? And I will fill the supervisor in as well so that the supervisor can be part of the decision and part of implementing the solution.” This is not easy. This is something that I need to be reminded of on a regular basis because business owners are so used to solving problems that as the company grows, it is a challenge to start respecting the chain of command. But if business owners don’t, chaos results.
Conclusion
Thanks for joining us today. If you would like to find out more, check out our YouTube channel. We have a lot of similar topics there. And if you have questions that weren’t answered today, I would love for you to submit them. You can submit them by email or by adding a question in the comment section below. Lastly, if you would like to stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter at aaronhall.com/free. I will also send you a free PDF, 7 Common Legal Mistakes Made by Small Businesses. Have a great day.