Is your business a bit of a circus?

A while ago I started working with a business owner who was sceptical about the quality of his managers.

Like many business owners who have become the bottleneck in their business he was desperate to get out from under all the things that, apparently, only he could do and the decisions that, apparently, only he could make.  He didn’t see his managers as part of the solution but as part of the problem.

Our initial discussion started out along the lines of where and how he would find some “big hitter” from a larger business who would help him achieve his ambitious growth targets.

I asked him how he knew that his managers weren’t up to the task.  As is usual in these cases the answer was a series of anecdotes about failures to do x or inability to understand the importance of y or how they didn't take the success of the business seriously.  A little probing however showed that he had never really explained to them where the business was going, what their role in this was and what success in the role looked like.

Every time someone came to him with a problem he solved it for them – whether that was an angry customer or a blocked sink.  He was training his managers to be helpless.

At this point I suggested that perhaps some or all of them might indeed be incapable of managing but he hadn’t really given them the chance to prove it one way or the other.  Furthermore, replacing them with strangers on twice the salary was, to put it mildly, a risk – particularly when they would be hired into the same dysfunctional setup.

We put in place a framework that allowed my client to develop his managers and quickly establish whether he had indeed been desperately unlucky in hiring nothing but clowns or whether some other common factor was in play.  He involved them in his thinking about the future of the business, got them to create their own job descriptions focused on responsibilities, devised with them simple performance measurements and discussed these in regular management meetings.  He also stopped giving them answers, instead taking every question as a chance to coach them to a solution and reinforce their responsibility.

At subsequent meetings my client said some interesting things.  Firstly, he found he has much more time to focus on the long term, such as his exit plan.  Secondly, after a recent crisis (in which he did have to intervene), the managers concerned have, of their own accord, developed a protocol and checklist to prevent re-occurrence.  This is what Agyris calls double-loop learning, or organisational learning, and is pretty sophisticated for an inexperienced management team.  Thirdly, the business is well ahead of his growth targets, even in difficult times.

He is giving his managers the clarity, structure and support to succeed – and they are all succeeding.  He will still have to hire some more managers but not to learn from them.  He will be teaching them how to do more of what is already working.

If you’d like to learn more about how systemisation can help you get out from underneath your business and turn your clowns into managers then you should attend one of these events.

Revised and updated from a previuos post on this site  Since then the owner has attracted significant external investment and doubled the size of the business.

Do your employees know where the edge is?

I had my first meeting with a new client recently.  One of his objectives is to stop being the first point of call for any employee with a question or problem.

I asked him what he does when this happens and his response was that he answers their question or tells them how to solve the problem.  I could see that before he got to the end of his answer he had started to realise that this was teaching his employees to keep bringing him their questions and problems and eroding their will and capacity to decide for themselves.

We talked about why he behaves this way and his answer was:

• It's quicker to tell them the answer than it is to teach them how to solve it themselves, or to get into a discussion about why they feel they can't decide for themselves
• He worries that if he directs them to their line manager or supervisor then that person might give them the wrong answer (by which he meant, a different answer to the one he would give)
• He does not want to lose control of what is going on in the business

Fixing this issue is of course essential if he wants to achieve his aim of a scalable, sellable business that does not rely upon him.  It also requires sustained effort on a number of levels from the procedural to the behavioural.  However, we have to start somewhere so I asked him how well he thought his employees understood the scope, authority and objectives of their roles.  The answer, after some probing, was "Not very well."  Some symptoms amongst many were missing job descriptions, lack of measurement and infrequent management reviews.

If you are blindfolded and not sure a) where you are and b) where you are going then you are unlikely to take bold decisive steps forward.  Instead you will shuffle forward, feeling for the edge - or just stand still making plaintive bleating noises.  In a business, if employees do not know where they are going or why, or what decisions they are allowed to make, or how something should be done, or who they report to and who reports to them,,,then they won't display initiative, innovate or take responsibility.  Instead, they will form a queue outside your door waiting for you to decide things for them.

If you'd like to learn more about how to make your business systemised, scalable and less dependent on you then register for one of these events.