{"id":1878,"date":"2026-11-09T11:10:06","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T11:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2026-11-09T11:19:48","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T11:19:48","slug":"the-cost-of-control-is-greater-than-the-cost-of-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/the-cost-of-control-is-greater-than-the-cost-of-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cost of Control Is Greater Than the Cost of Mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cIf you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. <\/em>
If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.\u201d<\/em>
– John Maxwell\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

If every decision in your org has to go through you, you don’t have a leadership team. You have a waiting line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to challenge you with something that took me years to figure out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of allowing someone on your team to make a mistake will almost always be less than the cost of having every decision bottlenecked at you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back at the early years of ledership, I was probably one of the biggest bottlenecks in the organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we were hiring somebody, I wanted to meet them, shake their hand, and know their name. Every invoice that went out the door? I wanted to put my eyes on it. Customer complaint? I wanted to be involved. Purchasing a piece of equipment? I wanted a say in the decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And you know what – I convinced myself that was good leadership. I was protecting the company, maintaining standards, and making sure things were done right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what I was actually doing was slowing down the very organization I was working so hard to grow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn’t developing leaders. I was developing people who needed my permission to lead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s something I’ve learned. Micromanagement often disguises itself as caring about the business. We train our people to ask permission for everything, then complain that nobody takes ownership!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you delegate tasks, you create followers. When you delegate authority, you create leaders.\u201d<\/em> – Craig Groeschel <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think about the actual cost for a sec…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A manager makes a bad decision and it costs you $500. Maybe a customer gets frustrated. Maybe you spend an hour coaching someone through what went wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what does it cost when 20 people are waiting on YOU to make decisions? When opportunities pass because nobody feels empowered to act? When your evenings, weekends, and family time are constantly interrupted?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cost of a mistake might be a few hundred dollars. The cost of being the bottleneck could be the future of your organization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here’s where this gets really interesting…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look at the growth of Atlas over the last four or five years, it didn’t happen because I was at the helm of everything. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of our greatest growth came from cascading leadership. We developed managers who could lead other managers, who developed supervisors and crew leaders capable of making decisions and taking ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growth was no longer dependent on how much I could personally manage in a day.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let me tell you, that’s a heck of a lot more sustainable than having one person trying to hold the entire organization together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back on 15.5 years of building Atlas, the company didn’t become more valuable because I got better at making every decision. It became more valuable because we developed people, built systems, and created an organization that could operate without me being involved in everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s the difference between building a business and building yourself a job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here’s my challenge this week. Find one or two decisions you’re currently making that somebody else on your team should be making. Give them the authority. Establish the guardrails. And get the heck out of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Will they occasionally get it wrong? Absolutely. Coach them through it and give them another opportunity. You cannot develop confident leaders in an environment where people are afraid to make mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stop measuring your leadership by how many decisions you make and how often your team calls you. Start measuring it by how many decisions your team can make without you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Give your people permission to fail.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might be surprised how quickly they learn to succeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate.\u201d – John Maxwell\u00a0 If every decision in your org has to go through you, you don’t have a leadership team. You have a waiting line. I want … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1879,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1881,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/1881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/samgembel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}