There is a distinction between the attributes of a CEO of a mid-size company and the General Manager of a single location small business. There is also a great divide between the owner-operator and founder of the same small business and the ideal GM to succeed in managing the business long term after a sale. If you try to get as close to the founder as able you may find yourself stuck in that location permanently. If you try to hire it, you are bound for frustration.
Small businesses are not simply scaled down large companies. The teams are too small to have the specialized roles of larger companies. In some ways, the small business is way more difficult than the larger corporation to manage. It requires people with breadth. If you are an entrepreneur building or buying your first small business, you can and will do lots of things as the leader. If you are hiring managers with geographically dispersed teams of 5-25 people, the key attributes we like best are initiative and galvanizing.
Initiative in a small team is the difference maker between someone who consistently shows up to work on time and the team leader. Showing up is not initiative. It’s follow through. You need lots of people to follow through. When you get a few people with initiative on the team it spreads. The whole team accomplishes more per day than usual because the leader sets the pace. Initiative starts while others hesitate. Initiative makes a decision and moves forward. Initiative knows things won’t become perfect before the moment passes by. Initiative gets a team of 5 or 25 in motion. Our chief pilot at Skydive Indianapolis ends every daily huddle with the phrase: “Now get to work.” He’s an Italian from New Jersey and his delivery is both funny and rings of truth. That’s initiative. And that team has lots of it. And it works.
Galvanizing brings team together and holds them together. Someone with lots of initiative but low galvanizing can start lots of things but they have a way of driving people apart. Other people are very strong at galvanizing. They often succeed in sales. People want to join them and stay with them. They get people to do things that don’t seem logical to outsiders. They pull it off where others would not have. Besides, there is natural entropy in a group in the absence of a galvanizing leader. This leader draws them back together even when they’re sort of annoyed with each other.
When you combine galvanizing and initiative you find someone who regularly gathers people together and starts them in motion over and over. Most people respond to these attributes. Sometimes these attributes look like a great sense of humor and other times it’s more hard-charging. Sometimes it’s more quiet but consistent.
This is not exhaustive. There are other skills depending on the role. But, sometimes we’ve hired people who were “good with people” or had operations or sales experience in the technical field. And they have not succeeded. We have also hired people that did not look the part of the GM initially but have excelled long term. In all cases our best GMs have these attributes.
Low initiative general managers don’t start things fast enough. They find excuses to put off. The team slows down to their pace. The whole things slips into mediocrity or worse. In service businesses like ours you cannot bring this from HQ to the location. It has to be local. I’m loaded in initiative. I thought I could counteract other’s low initiative by me starting things. But that doesn’t take root as well. Even if I’m high galvanizing.
Low galvanizing general managers don’t keep the team together. They might start things –even the start the right things– but they find excuses to not involve others. They say things like, “they should know how to do this” or “they should see me doing it and step in.” Instead they find themselves stepping in and doing it themselves too often. They don’t want the team to get bigger because it would mean more problems. They might talk big but they sabotage the efficacy of the team by their absence of lubricating the system that makes the team effective as a unit. Galvanizing isn’t just inspiration. It’s the regular gathering of the people, every day that is necessary. I thought I could inspire the team when spirits waxed and wained. But galvanizing is needed every day, sometimes every moment of every working hour. And it needs to be on-site. We have to hire for it.
So, look for initiative and galvanizing. Cross reference your ideas of good people through these filters and demand that both be present. One good General Manager can make a whole team of people perform. Fix the GM. Fix the team.