045: How Great Leaders Empower Without Micromanaging

What if the key to being a great leader isn’t about control, but about letting go? In this episode, we break down the leadership parallels between coaching young athletes and managing high-performing business teams—and why micromanagement stifles growth.

We explore the "joysticking" effect—when leaders hover too closely and unintentionally hold back their team. Instead, the best leaders empower decision-making, reflection, and ownership, whether on the field or in the boardroom.

🏆 Learn why debriefs & self-reflection are game-changers for long-term growth.
🏆 Discover the leadership strategies that build accountability without micromanaging.
🏆 Get real-life coaching insights that apply to sports, business, and leadership at every level.

Are you leading with trust or control? Tune in now to find out. 🎧

Ivan Fernandez on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-fernandez-9a41958

spn networks:
https://spnnetworks.com

===================================
📒 Resources Referenced in this Episode: 📒
===================================

Simple Truths of Service
by Ken Blanchard (Author), Barbara Glanz (Author)
https://amzn.to/3zX2kCw

The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities
by Patrick M. Lencioni (Author)
https://amzn.to/3A55gx9

Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire
by Dan Martell (Author)
https://amzn.to/3Yk3hz2

Chapters

• 0:00 Coaching Styles and Their Impact
• 9:46 Parallels Between Coaching and Business
• 36:39 The Importance of Empowerment in Leadership

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

And you're not really allowing your players to develop their own skills and make their own decisions, because you're just on the sidelines yelling at them, joysticking them, telling them what to do. And I realize that's the same thing with a lot of business owners is that we're entrepreneurs. Sometimes you're just delegating tasks to your employees and you're telling them what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and you're not allowing them to really make their own decisions, make their own mistakes, and so really, what I've learned about coaching is that I'm going to just put myself in your shoes for a second because I'm thinking, oh geez, like now.

Speaker 2: 0:36

you said this was eight year old girl's soccer, correct? Yes, and are you an expert in the world of soccer? No, I'm not so how did you you know like I how did you overcome just because me, I'm just putting myself in those shoes and thinking, geez, what do I know about eight year old girls in soccer? I know nothing, right, so like to step in and say, okay, I'm going to be a coach? Um, what did that look and feel like for you and how did overcome that?

Speaker 1: 1:03

yeah. So that was um. You know what um I? I went through ayso and ayso has a really good program. I believe in it and you know people have mixed feelings about the program but from my perspective it's really all volunteer based and when you think about coaching an eight-year-old girl, it's really just the fundamentals good ball contact, dribbling the ball up and down, positioning, getting to understand how soccer works, what the positions are, what the rules of the goalkeeper are, and it's just really about allowing them to fall in love with the sport so they can continue on their journey of soccer. And so, you know, although it can be very competitive at eight-year-olds, right, parents are very competitive by nature. You know we don't keep score during the soccer games, although the parents do, but officially we don't keep score of the game and it's just really about making it fun for them. So I think anyone can do that.

Speaker 1: 2:10

When I say I didn't grow up with soccer, I mean I grew up playing it on the street with friends, but I wasn't part of a club. I wasn't part of a soccer team, growing up or going to competitions. But honestly, I just realized that, yes, I can show up for them and I can be there. I can have everything ready for them, I can provide a good experience. But one thing that I would actually share with you too that you didn't quite ask me about this, but there's so many parallels between running a company and being a coach. I'd like to share some of those with you too.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Yeah, I would love to hear them.

Speaker 1: 2:51

Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:51

So what I realized about coaching and running a company is that a lot of the times when you're when you're when you're out in the field, you're teaching your, your players, different drills and you're coaching them, and it's the same thing you're doing in a company. You got your employees and you got to basically also coach them throughout the day and get them to understand different ways of doing things or create processes and procedures for them of doing things or create processes and procedures for them. But one of the biggest things that is frowned upon with some coaches is this thing called joysticking, and what that means is you have your time for practices during the week and then you've got your games on the weekends. And on the games on the weekends, a lot of coaches like to tell the players what to do. It's like, hey, move up, move down, block that person, or you're yelling Valentina, I need you to move more to the right, more to the left. And you're not really allowing your players to develop their own skills and make their own decisions because you're just on the sidelines yelling at them, joysticking them, telling them what to do.

Speaker 1: 4:04

And I realize that's the same thing with a lot of business owners is that we're entrepreneurs and sometimes you're just delegating tasks to your employees and you're telling them what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and you're not allowing them to really make their own decisions, make their own mistakes, and so really, what I've learned about coaching is that there's a time and a place to be able to coach your I'm already mixing this up your players, but when it's game time, it's really more about letting them play the game, taking notes about what their weaknesses are, what their strengths are, how they're working as a team, and then be able to take that information then and then, during practice, fine-tune and then let them go back out on game day again.

Speaker 1: 4:51

And that's really one of the biggest things that I see in connection with running a business. It's that you got to allow your team to make mistakes. You got to allow them, to give them the freedom to explore, come up with new ideas, new solutions, and you also then have to make time to provide coaching. But if you're there every day telling them what to do, it gets frustrating for your employees and for your players, and that's just one of the things that I found as a correlation which is kind of big, but I always find myself that, going back to coaching eight-year-old girls and running my business, there's different ways. There's a lot of similarities between those two.

Speaker 2: 5:37

So when you remember the joy sticking and I look at it in my mind I'm going, okay, so you let them play their game.

Speaker 2: 5:44

Yeah, obviously you still coached with being a coach, but then it's more like you're taking, you're assessing that and then almost like looking at that post-game footage, you know you're taking all that and then you're going, okay, these are things that we knew, we noticed on the field, right and don't understand the game, things that we could work on the next, for the next game. Maybe let them play the game when it's, when it's time to play the game. And when you talk about in the business, you know joysticking, I guess at the same time would some people maybe call that micromanaging. When it comes back to you know your employee and not actually letting them given some room to make some decisions or learn a little bit from maybe some mistakes or maybe help guide them. Or maybe it's scenarios where you say, hey, I would like you to once again we have this issue Come up with a couple concepts how you think we can resolve this and let's assess those and kind of like prove out why we think one might work better than another.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Or another thing too is we've been doing a lot of projects here at SQ Networks for clients, and at the end of the project and we're done, we have a post-mortem or we call them debriefs, where we sit down in a room with the project manager, the technician, everyone that was involved and touched that project, and we break down, okay, what went well, what didn't go well. But we really want to get down to the root cause analysis of like, okay, you know, what can we do to get better, as you kind of were describing to me at the beginning of the podcast. Getting like, every podcast has to get a little bit, a little bit better, right, yeah, and that's what? Um, the same thing. It's provides an opportunity to you know, review how the project went, um, find to make adjustments and then, you know, hit it harder the next time you go out there to the next project.

Speaker 1: 7:34

Sure, and that's, I think, the same thing with with coaching, at least all the good coaches, it's.

Speaker 1: 7:38

It's if you're just yelling at your players, you know, play by play, and you're telling them to move into open space, move to the left, drop back, move forward, look at the ball.

Speaker 1: 7:48

Um, they're always going to be dependent on on you to to know what to do. But if you slowly allow them to play the game, understand the game, um, your job as a coach is really to just assess how they're playing and be able to provide feedback off the game. Now, I'm not going to say it's perfect that way all the time, because sometimes you do get really emotional in a game and it could be a nail-biting game where you're about to win and you might yell out there, but I do catch myself. You know, wanting to allow them to to play and and have fun at the same time. And the same thing with your employees. You want them to be able to feel like they're coming up with their own plans and, um, they're bringing problems to you with, along with some solutions for you to um, look at Um, and so, yeah, those. That's kind of the correlation between soccer and leadership that I've noticed the last couple of years.

Speaker 2: 8:46

Hi, I'm Mark Thomas, founder and CEO of Current Tech Solutions and CyberGuardians. We know business owners like you want to focus on growing your company, not worrying about IT problems or security threats. That's where we come in. Our team uses AI to protect your business from cyber risks and keep everything running smoothly. If you're ready for peace of mind and a stronger future, reach out to us today. Let's secure and elevate your business together. Outro Music.