Last week in a client session, two team members rushed in frantically just as we were about to start the meeting. They dropped into their seats with disheveled hair and scowls on their faces. One of them said they didn’t get any sleep the night before because they were up all night with a sick child.

I took a deep breath and thought to myself, “Oh boy, this is going to be a tough day.”

In film making, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. However, I recently learned about a 180-degree rule which can  be applied to business.

I learned it from Rich Lucia who has built his speaking and consulting brand around the term Selling in the Now. Rich has applied the knowledge we have about our lizard brain, the amygdala, and it’s bias towards negativity, to harness it in a positive way in brainstorming and solution creation.

Chances are, you do many things well. As a business owner, this may have been imperative at times, especially in the early days when you had no choice but to do it all yourself.

Then at some point your business gained traction. The opportunities continued to grow, but so did the complexities of running the business.

Along the way, you may have become comfortable in certain roles such as being the ultimate decision maker, the go-to person for business processes, or just the person that seems to have all the right answers. Everyone wanted a piece of you!

I consider myself to be somewhat “old school.” That term carries different connotations, and whether it’s good or bad depends on how you mean it. I’m proud of my old school leanings because it means I respect good traditions, appreciate my heritage, and stick with tried-and-true ideas that have consistently led to success in the past.

But there is another kind of old school thinking that, if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur, can lead to extinction. Sticking to old ideas that have proven not to work well can make you a dinosaur. I’ve seen people lose their businesses that way while their competition flourished.

Here are three old-school leadership ideas that will stifle your business growth, and how to break free of them.

Have you ever struggled with letting someone else do something that you can do faster, better, and with less effort? If you really think it through, you know that if you don’t pass the task on, you'll be doing it yourself forever.

If this task is in fact the best use of your time, then maybe the staff member isn’t needed. But if there's a better use of your time, then you have delegate it to someone else who will do it slower, not quite as good, and with more effort. You have to let go of the vine*.

How much of your week is spent doing these types of tasks?