Many business owners wish they could be less involved in the day to day operations of their business. They dream of having more time to focus on growing their business, making their business more profitable or the holy grail of maybe having their business run smoothly without much involvement from them at all!
This is always a challenge and even more so for those business owners who hire the right people and STILL micro-manage them but that’s a whole other blog post!
5 Issues to be Hurdled to Make the Transition From Doer to Manager to Executive.
1 – Hiring qualified people
Business owners tend to go the cheap route and hire less qualified people because they cost less. Is that you? Have you hired your friends son because he’s technically too young to work but hey, he can surely do this stuff that you need done? Maybe, maybe not. It’s more likely to look like the business owner spending too much time worrying about the unqualified person doing it right. This rarely happens, and they end up having to spend more time re-doing the work. This of course causes frustration for the employee because they can’t read your mind and for you because your workload has now doubled.
Before long the business owner is getting increasingly frustrated that “everything falls back on them” to do it the right way. Sound familiar? Exercise extreme caution when hiring family and friends because they need a job or you need help. If they aren’t qualified or interested please do yourself (and them) a favour and overlook them. It’s much harder to fire a family member or friend than it is to hire the right person for the job.
2 – Training
Newsflash! People are not going to just figure it out themselves. Unqualified employees can’t be expected to be plopped into position and be ready to go. Remember, you got them on the cheap so they are hardly motivated either. If you don’t spend time training people they will never do it the way you want (or better) and you will forever be frustrated with their performance and guess what? You’re still re-doing whatever they managed to accomplish! We talked about the frustrated employee already yes? What happens to frustrated employees? They stop trying and/or leave and you start all over again with the new hire. Yikes!
3- Policies and Procedures
This one tends to get overlooked a lot especially in the early years of growing a business. “Everything that gets measured gets done!” Having systems and procedures in place help a business stay on track, be efficient and make the best use of the time they have to work with. Employees need to know what is expected, and be held accountable for not meeting those expectations. This one involves some serious growing pains especially if you’ve been in business a few years already without structure. Fear not! Once they understand and start to comply things fall into place and the new hires are on board right away so have no memory of the way things were. The best part of this is when you get to hear the veterans tell everyone at the company holiday party about how things used to be around here!
4- Delegation
This might be the hardest for most business owners and do you know why? It’s because they’ve skipped items 1, 2 and 3! Getting the confidence to delegate comes from hiring qualified people, training them for your business and making sure they understand and follow the policies and procedures for your business. That beautiful feeling when you hand over a task that turns out to either meet or even exceed your expectations will have you fist pumping at the next networking event because you are finally on the other side! Being able to delegate effectively frees you up to work on business growth. All of those little ideas that you keep writing down you can get to them and oh watch the magic happen!
5 – You
I know what you’re thinking, “you’re the only one doing anything the way it *needs* to be done.” I will challenge you to look long and hard at your business and how well you’ve implemented items 1-4. Once you’ve done that maybe you now need to take a long hard look at you and how you do things and maybe you need to get out of your own way to allow for great things to happen in your business! Maybe you love the production part of your business or you love the sales part. Maybe you just want to hire someone to do the stuff you don’t like doing and keep the fun stuff. Be careful with all of that and consider simply hiring the right people to do the work and you take the position of managing those people. Think big, be brave and make the jump from doer to manager and when you’re ready that executive job is waiting for you!
