As we come down to the wire on the March Madness program, it has been interesting to hear the stories that people are telling me (and themselves) about why they cannot possibly get away to join us.

It is always easier to see how other people deceive themselves than it is to see our own self-deceptions (and we all have them), but they did lead me to an interesting insight.

The most common story concerns a schedule conflict of some sort. I am not questioning that prior commitments and the inability to be in two places at the same time will lead you to set priorities and make choices. The issue for me is the unconscious premise that makes the story believable in the first place.

(One of my favorite quotes says, "The truth can set you free ... but first it can really pi** you off!" To illustrate what struck me, I will use the Minneapolis seminar as an example, but understand it could have been anything.)

OK, so let's say you are the owner of a restaurant. You suspect a recession is looming on the horizon. You have already seen a slight slip in sales and the general mood in the marketplace is pessimistic.

You learn of a seminar that promises to provide information vital to the continued success of the business as it enters this critical economic period. You say you want to attend but a previous engagement makes that impossible. I guess that means the business cannot get the information, right?

Well ... yes ... IF you are the only person in the organization who can be entrusted with the material in the seminar. That thought -- and it's only a thought -- is the unconscious premise controlling this situation. Because you never stopped to question "the way it is" (which you made up in the first place) I'm sure it never occurred to you that by buying into that story, you may have put your business at risk unnecessarily.

Not to minimize your value to the organization, but if you sent a few of your key staffers to a session like this -- with or without you being in attendance -- they might actually produce better results for the company than you would.

Why? Because the odds are that you already have a lot on your plate. If you attended by yourself, you would get some great ideas ... but then it would fall solely to you to implement them. Adding more balls to your personal juggle is a recipe for overload. By having the results depend on you, this solo approach actually decreases the chances of fully implementing any new programs.

On the other hand, if you can get past your ego, give up the illusion of control and recognize the belief that you are the only person in the company who must absorb -- and apply -- any new idea for the fabrication it is, you will bring your key staff into the loop. This will lighten your workload, raise morale and be an important step in their professional development.

Your crew won't take ownership until they have something to own, so why not let them own something? That's pretty much the way we learned it. And since they they have fewer demands on their time than you do, they will bring more energy to bear on the issues and are more likely to follow through with implementation. You would be nuts not to take advantage of that!

As long as the critical information and ideas are somewhere in the organization and are being properly applied to your growth and prosperity, do you really care that others know things that you don't?