Capital is defined at tangible and intangible assets. Common is cash, marketable securities, real estate and operating companies. Uncommon is goodwill and time. I want to focus this article on time –specifically on leadership time.
How does a founder allocate his or her time? Where is the most leverage? How can you accomplish more with your time?
You must get more output from your team. “More” can be defined as more units per hour, or higher margin work.
Driving focus of your middle management is key. To aide them in focus you need bottom up support from their teams. You need front line looking for the sweet spot in every project. Where is our edge, or even more specifically, where is my edge in this particular situation?
Through continuous improvement you can scale up your team.
The biggest hinderence for most founders is stepping out of the day-to-day without sacrificing decision quality. The usual cause is making oneself the bottleneck to decisions.
Most management ought to be systematic. Repetition is the owner’s friend. Most founders started businesses because they like the new and different. They like the challenge of solving problems they’ve rarely encountered. But, the rent checks are what pay the bills. The capital allocator must develop a seasoned pace for their people to handle the inbound problems that show up every day. And develop methods to equip their managers to handle the larger change initiatives that are required to stay relevant in a dynamic environment where competitors are also inventing and improving and changing in positive means. To accomplish this you need humans. High caliber humans. You can either pay up to get them on your team, or you can train them up and hold them to a system of stability and balanced growth that works within their local constraints.
Most people –especially employees– hate change. It creates stress that when added to their baseline pressures creates panic moments that lead to blow ups. Just today we had a front line technician blow up on his teammates because he was feeling overwhelmed. His pressure gauge hit panic-mode. I’m not saying every system prevents this from happening. Nor am I suggesting that we ought to never push our teammates to the point of break downs. I think it’s important that our leadership knows how to take individuals to this point and back and keep them near peak performance without the whole team barreling into chaos and failure.
Step one is finding time sucks and batching them up, systematically organizing them and then delegating their resolution. Usually this is solved long term by prevention. But, first you have to identify them. The biggest offender between a company that can scale and one that won’t/cannot? Leadership interruptions.
Problems pop up. What are you doing to equip your managers to eliminate them ones you know will occur before they appear? The biggest problem? Unresolved employee issues. They bubble up and boil over. Solution? Provide regular pressure relief valves.
Then, listen. Absorb. Organize. And implement positive changes in an orderly way.
The first step in allocating leadership time is spending time listening. You must rotate from vision, command and control, to vision, reassurance and systematic listening.
Listening is about hearing and responding. Take in the information, organize, decide, implement change. How much of what can your team handle? You don’t know if you don’t know ever teammate. And you cannot know every teammate once you get to a certain headcount. So what then? You have to train your managers how to do it –and do it well.
Leading by example is a start but it has to go beyond that if you want to go faster. It simply takes too long and is too rare to expect to develop or find leaders that will match your decision making framework. No one else on your team has the context and vision you have as pure as you have it. You have to explain it and then enforce it without ruining the environment or squashing other’s ability to bring their insights to the table.
We use The Listening Way to install this in small companies that we buy. Sellers are amazed. “I never knew you operated like this.” And “We should have done something with you earlier.”
Teammates say “I’ve never had a boss I’ve liked.” “You guys have improved my life on so many levels.” “I thought it was just my manager but it’s every one of your managers.”
And it’s not me. It’s not even the managers. It’s literally the absence of listening that most employees don’t get. They don’t have outlets to express themselves to their bosses. And they certainly don’t have bosses that want to help them succeed at life. And then systematically follow through over the years.
Does it always work for everyone? No. The most common break down is the low level technician or customer support person that simply doesn’t want to climb. They want to blame others when their own self is who is limiting their growth.