The Day I Realised I Could No Longer Do Everything Myself

There comes a point in almost every career where you suddenly realise that working harder is no longer the answer. Up until then, every promotion has probably been earned by being the person who knows the most, works the longest hours and personally fixes the biggest problems. Eventually though, if you're lucky enough to keep progressing, your job changes without you really noticing. Mine certainly did.

The obvious answer was delegation, but that wasn't quite as straightforward as it sounds. I had some excellent people working for me, but none of them was quite ready to take complete ownership of the pricing function, so I found myself thinking back to my time at Sunworld and the one person I knew already had both the technical ability and the commercial judgement to do the job. That person was my old deputy, Seamus Conlon.

Unfortunately, Seamus wasn't remotely interested.

He had settled into London life, had just moved in with his girlfriend Jo and quite understandably viewed moving north as a backwards step. I couldn't really argue with him because only a few years earlier I had wrestled with exactly the same decision myself when Airtours persuaded me to leave London. Sometimes recruitment has very little to do with money or job titles and everything to do with where somebody is in their life.

The first year probably wasn't much fun for either of us because I insisted he followed every process I had developed over the previous few years. We worked seven-day weeks, regularly through the night, racing to hit brochure print deadlines exactly as I always had.

Seamus never complained during the project, but once we had survived it he made his position crystal clear. We were never doing that again. He had his own ideas, his own systems, and if he was going to be accountable for the results, then he intended to run the department his way.

Listening to him, I realised I had become exactly the sort of manager I used to promise myself I would never be. I had recruited someone because I trusted their ability, yet I was still trying to make them become another version of me.

Ton Waslander had given me room to develop my own approach years earlier, and now it was my turn to do exactly the same for someone else. Once I stepped back, Seamus improved many of the processes I'd treated as untouchable, and I never again involved myself in the day-to-day detail of brochure pricing.

Around the same time, my boss, George Marcall, quietly booked me onto a five-day management course in Scotland.

He simply said it was about working with colleagues more effectively, although after a couple of days it became painfully obvious what he was really trying to tell me. The exercises asked us to map how we believed other people saw us, and the picture I ended up drawing wasn't especially flattering. I had been so determined to prove myself that I had developed an unfortunate habit of grabbing the credit, dominating discussions and assuming I always knew the answer. Put more simply, I was behaving like an arrogant twat, and people found me hard work.

Recruiting Seamus and sitting through that course probably changed my management style more than any promotion ever did because both experiences arrived at exactly the same point in my career.

One forced me to accept that other people could often do parts of my job better than I could, whilst the other forced me to recognise that building a successful team wasn't about surrounding myself with people who thought exactly as I did.

It was about finding talented individuals with different strengths, giving them room to improve what already existed and accepting that the business would become stronger the less it depended on me.

Once I finally understood that my role stopped being about doing everything myself and became about helping other people do it better than I ever could.