1853 – From Micromanagement to Leadership with Valerie Delforge

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2:09With us right now, Valerie Del Forge. Valerie, you are the founder and CEO of the Del Forge Group. You are found on the web at thedelforgegroup.co.uk. Valerie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be talking to you today. Yes, yes. So I would love to learn more about who you serve. I kind of know because I'm looking at your website. But for our friend that's listening to our conversation, let's tell them who you work with and the impact that you have created in the world. For sure. Thank you. So I'm basically a French girl in London, UK. I arrived when I was much younger, over 30 years ago, and started in the beauty industry very, very quickly.

2:54and so my last role before becoming a consultant was head of spa operation for Steiner Europe which is kind of a big corporation in the beauty world and the hairdresser world and 10 years ago I kind of took the leap and I started my consulting company where I'll support owners and to really grow their business and grow their thought process the mindset and the strategy around what they want to achieve because a lot of time Josh I'm sure you're aware that we have so many factors that perhaps are affecting the growth and sometimes we're not aware of that so I just love doing one-to-one coaching and understanding the business inside out and then growing that business but predominantly of course it's a spa beauty industry but I do kind of coach other industries or our coach entrepreneurs, our coach consultants who want to grow their business.

3:51So it's kind of varied, but the main bulk of the business, obviously for artists is coming from the beauty and spa industry. Yeah, well, okay. So your book, and this is what I'm really excited to talk about is titled, I'd Rather Do It Myself, From Micromanagement to Leadership. All right, Valerie, from your lips to God, ears. Let's help some well-intended leaders in the world who need to let it go, let it go, and let our teams and our great people that we surround ourselves do what they do best. I'd love to hear your mini TED talk on this topic. I mean, you know, I grew up in the non-Facebook and the non-Google world and you know you had to kind of network a lot more and you had to really structure your business in a certain way and as all of this came we are actually perhaps surrounded with so many resources and we have so much things that we can do sometimes what we do as an entrepreneur is we create something so we it's our babies and it's what we've done is we've nurtured it from the infancy to what it is now.

5:11So we know every aspect of the business. And as we grow, it's very difficult to let go of things and let go of the certain things that you don't really want to do anymore, but you just want to control. And as I was growing in my roles, what I do remember from these times is that I wanted to learn about leadership, manage very, very large teams very, very quickly in my career, you know, up to 230 people at some point. So, you know, I had to learn about leadership and there was no Google, no Facebook, et cetera. So I learned a lot about leadership on different industries. And what really struck me was very much about me as a leader and, you know, how I need to behave as a leader.

5:55But I always felt I like to see something and kind of flip it around a little bit. And I thought, actually, okay, how is my leadership because I'm going to be a different leader to yourself or to someone else how is my leadership affecting my staff how my leadership is going to affect my structure and how is my leadership is going to affect the operation of the business so when you start looking at it on a different kind of perspective it allows you to understand what you need what you don't need anymore and how do you want to work as an entrepreneur as a leader you know because the work-life balance is very important And yet we meet entrepreneurs and owners who are absolutely on the brink of a burnout because they're doing too much and they're not structured anymore.

6:41So their leadership is just literally weighed down by all the day-to-day operation. That's what they need to do. And actually, there's no more leadership in the end. And this is where the micromanagement starts to become bigger and bigger and bigger. And we're not even aware of it a lot of time, you know. recently I was talking to a client who said you know on Sunday when I do my VAT I was like why do you do your VAT on a Sunday you know but oh well you know it's just it's just a lot no we don't do VAT on a Sunday you ask the accountant how much does that cost and she called me I said an extra hundred pounds right it's going to be the best hundred pounds you you've ever spent but we are in a habit and as the business grow we don't really understand you know what could help and what could support us because we're in that habit.

7:30There are big consequences to leaders who are meddling too much. Can you talk about, and I'm sure you have some really great examples in your world of, you know, organizations or companies where the leader is just way too up in their team's stuff. And probably a lot of, I mean, there's unintended consequences of this. Would you mind maybe sharing some of like how this ends up manifesting in a pretty negative way? I mean, the most negative way is a lack of trust. So I think that's what comes to the team is that I'm not being trusted. If I'm being given something and you're not really trusting the process of how I need to learn as a team member, perhaps I don't, you know, we forget.

8:17I think we forget. We've acquired that experience. We forget that we need to teach that experience sometimes. And we assume it's going to be very quick. So the lack of trust becomes a real impact in a team and the senior teams as well, where they feel that they can't do anything right or they can't really have an impact on anything that they want to do because it's micromanaged to the minutes. I mean, I had a client of mine who basically, you know, wanted an email in the morning, in the evening of what the manager had done. And he said, why? Why do you need an email in the morning and the evening?

8:53I mean, that's just too much. All she's going to do is worry about that email morning and night. But I just need to know what she's doing. Well, it is a trust that needs to be there. And a lot of time, the micromanager is not aware that that's what they're doing, if that makes sense. So I think the lack of trust is a big, big one. And also a lot of teams, when there's a micromanager, that's just too involved. it's it's just suffocating and actually it's not enjoyable there's no team culture so the team culture becomes just you know well just wait and see what the boss is going to say or the boss is going to do because there's no point doing it you know so the team culture really really suffers in terms of that kind of micromanagement style um but i feel that it's a you know every time i kind of assessing micromanager the biggest aspect of it is the lack of the work-life balance which we're all craving but somehow we're expecting as a micromanager that everyone's got the same standards but they don't and there's some people value their time at home some people value their time well um you know in what they want to do and somehow it's not well perceived there's been a lot of talks isn't it about quite quitting and all these things that have happened over the recent years and And I'm not surprised, you know, I'm not surprised because we keep blaming they don't do this, they don't do that.

10:23But actually, are we letting them get on with the work in a certain time period? So I'll give you an example. One of my clients had a manager where, you know, she was expecting her to deliver services and to manage. But she had one hour admin time a week when really when you assess the workload, she needs a day. I can't give her a whole day why why can't we give her a whole day if we want her to achieve otherwise we're setting people up for failure and you know I've been in jobs where I've been set up for failure no matter what I did it wasn't going to be good enough or it wasn't going to be strong enough and to me that's a huge lack of leadership we want it when we onboard someone when we employ someone we want them to succeed I want them to be better than me because if you're better than me.

11:10You're going to do even more things, you know, and you're going to be excited to do things. But I think it's the lack of team culture, the lack of, you know, support from the boss, it just becomes very, very one-sided. And that's just not great in terms of kind of longevity and enjoyment, full stop, if I'm totally honest. And then we wonder why we can't recruit, you know. okay so valerie how do you help leaders uh yeah i think the the key things to be honest with you the first thing a lot of people were expecting me that know me anyway were expecting me to write about how to run a successful beauty salon and hair salon and spouse and i could have done that but what i had assessed since the pandemic is that there's been a lot a lot of fear and fear is one of the side of why we micromanage.

12:05You know, since the pandemic, there's a lot of fear on the recruitment, on losing the business, et cetera. So we've kind of really taken everything back ourselves instead of feeling that we can, you know, we can trust people around us. And the first thing we do before even looking at numbers, before looking at businesses, before looking at what's going on in the business is we focus on the leader. and number one soft skills of leadership which to me is the most important one is time management and time management is sometimes underrated I feel that we oh yes I'm fine I've got my to-do list but actually the to-do list is very overwhelming the to-do list is not delegated which is another soft skill of the leader and another soft skill of leadership is communication So those three skills is what I focus on first.

12:59How do we time manage ourselves? How do we delegate and what do we do in order to communicate efficiently? A lot of time we meet owners that are entrepreneurs, you know, but I've told them 10 times. Yes. So maybe the communication is not right. How do you communicate? What do you do in order to reinforce that communication? So we're quick to blame the others, but perhaps we need to look on how, what the systems in place, what are the system in place in order to kind of be able to grow that business. And so this best thing we do is really understanding how you function as a leader. And then from that, then we really actually the owner feels a lot better.

13:40The entrepreneur feels a lot better. They feel more focused. They've got a time management that makes sense to them. I believe there's no coaching that is one size fit all I think it needs to be very adapted to you as a as a as a manager as an owner because ultimately you know you could have children at home you want to go back to you could have you know a very clear goal you want to get to you could have a budget you need to adhere to so we've got to adapt all of this according to to the leader's situation. And after that, we really dig down into the business and we give a very strong strategy on how to achieve their dream, basically.

14:20Yeah. So in a nutshell. Yeah. Valerie, you know, to our friend that's listening, go get this book. It's called, I'd Rather Do It Myself, From Micromanagement to Leadership. But also there's your website and that's thedelforgegroup.co.uk. Again, to our friend that's listening, who should be reaching out and what would you recommend they do? I think find me on LinkedIn is probably the easiest, Valerie Del Forge. And, you know, I'll be very happy to have a little chat with you if you feel there's something we can work together on. If you feel there's something that you can recognize yourself in, you know, are you overworking yourself?

14:57Are you finding that your goal is becoming distant, more and more distant? Are you finding that the team is not trusting you? Is There's something here that there is an element of the team not really dealing with you, why they're not dealing with you. So, you know, sometimes it's a matter of having that conversation and finding out if I can support you in what you want to achieve, really. Yeah, excellent. Valerie Del Forge, again, founder and CEO of the Del Forge Group, your website, thedelforgegroup.co.uk. And the book, I'd Rather Do It Myself, From Micromanagement to Leadership. Valerie Del Forge, thank you for joining us.

15:36Thank you so much for having me.

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