Are you managing your team, or mentoring them? Most leaders default to managing: setting expectations, assigning tasks, checking deadlines and fixing problems as they come up. It keeps things running, but it also keeps your team relying on you for every answer and keeps you stuck in the weeds.

In this episode, we unpack the difference between managing and mentoring, and why great leaders know which one the moment calls for.

We cover:

• What management does well, and where it falls short
• How mentoring builds confidence, capability and ownership
• When to manage (new starters, compliance, performance issues, urgent fixes) and when to mentor (capable but unsure team members, repeat questions, people ready to step up)
• Five simple steps to shift from managing to mentoring, from asking before you answer to recognising progress, not just results

“Managing gets the work done today. Mentoring builds the team that gets it done tomorrow. The best leaders do both.”

Your challenge this week: when a team member brings you a problem, pause before you answer and ask what they would do first. It’s a small shift, but it’s where mentoring starts.

Need help building the systems and admin support behind your team? Reach out to Dream Admin at admin@dreamadmin.com.au

Last fortnight Tim Glover took us inside military leadership, decision making under real pressure, and what the army knows about building teams. In part two we get into the harder human stuff.

Military units have a sense of identity most small businesses would kill for. Tim tells us whether that can be built on purpose or whether it only ever comes out of shared adversity, and how much of that intensity is worth chasing in a workplace at all.

We also talk communication. How to deliver hard news without sugar-coating it and without being cold, how to manage upwards and push back on decisions you disagree with, and how to run a debrief on a mistake so people own it rather than brace for it.

Tim finishes with the practices he'd take from the army into a small business, the biggest misconception civilians have about military leadership, and what he'd do in his first 90 days leading a team of ten.

If you missed part one, go back and start there.

Because at the end of the day, business is personal. And this is Her Take on Business.

Most small business owners learn leadership by accident. Tim Glover learned it at Duntroon, then tested it commanding soldiers in some of the highest pressure environments there are.

In part one we get to know Tim, from rugby fields to the army, and dig into wat military leadership actually is at its core and why it looks so different to how most civilian businesses think about it. We talk about making sound decisions when you are exhausted and the stakes are extreme, including what kept him steady during the Kabul evacuation, and how that translates to your own version of pressure on a Tuesday morning.

Then we get into teams. How do you work out quickly what makes each person tick, why does promoting your best technical performer into management so often go badly, and where is the line between holding a standard and crushing morale.

This session was too good to squeeze into a single episode, so we've split it in two. If you've enjoyed part one, come back for part two, which drops in a fortnight. Hit follow so it lands in your feed the moment it's out.