To Grow Try This… Through Buy-In, Buy-In, Buy-In
Unless you have acquired God-like properties, you can’t be omnipresent, that is, in all places at once. It is also almost certainly true that you can in fact do all the tasks that together make up your business better than any of the individuals you’ve hired to do them. However, if your present activities can earn you $100 per hour, then comparative advantage says don’t swap for a $20 per hour job, unless you are at least five times faster than the existing $20 jobholder.
That’s simple economics.
And as we think we have demonstrated in this book, unless you delegate tasks and, through operational controls, accountability and trust, you are not going to expand beyond where you are now, other than marginally. If, however, there is team buy-in to a company wide aspiration, you have in effect got an army of mini-me’s. Perhaps none quite as good as you, but nonetheless functioning for the good of the business without them needing to refer every single simple decision back to you.
How did you learn to ride a bike? Someone stood beside you to balance you, then ran alongside with one hand on the bike, providing stability, as you pedaled. Then suddenly, and probably without your knowledge, they let go and you pedaled on—on two wheels—yourself. And you probably went no further than the Wright Brothers did with early flights at Kitty Hawk—though you along the road, not through the air. Your cycle tutor trusted and you delivered, not immediately as elegantly as an Olympic cycling champion, but you moved your own cycling along.
Likewise, the results of trusting your team to make decisions for the business might initially not be as graceful as you would want it for yourself, but unless you involve others it is difficult to see how your business now as a Wright Flier 1 might ultimately morph into a Boeing jet.
If your team does walk the walk for the desired change for the business, then overwhelmingly the business will move forward. Of course things can and do go wrong. But they did when it was just you in the business as much as it does for corporations employing 100,000 plus people today. However, with the right team ethic, aspiration, trust—they are all interchangeable words—the overhead of a setback can be minimized.
When all said and done, it is possibly the fear of things going wrong that makes up a large portion of the reluctance to let go. However, a trusted team ought to be able to tell you the bad stuff as well as simultaneously fixing it. The alternatives of either not reporting failure or passing the issue to you for your exclusive fix are not places where you want your business to be.
Try This…a New Role for You?
We know a bioscientist who worked as CEO for a listed company giving it pretty much 24/7 attention at the expense of family and health. However, on borrowed time, he did lead his company to great things— sufficient for it to become the victim of a takeover. Our man’s inevitable reward was redundancy and a move to his own start-up.
In the new company, he took a lot of time out from normal CEO activity to make his direct reports the best they could be in their own disciplines as well as empowering them with much of the decision-making authority the CEO would normally reserve for himself. He now works full time in his start-up, that’s two and a half days a week, encouraging the team via aspiration and thereafter being available for PR and investor relations—both often receiving scant service by other, far busier, CEOs.
Somewhere in there is a very important message. A new you could seriously improve your productivity in total and be able to focus on areas not previously receiving sufficient of your attention. We bet if you own a restaurant, a weekly piece for your local news outlets from the kitchen would bring more trade to your door. If you are any sort of professional, a daily thought of the day posted onto your community’s website will encourage the readers to think first of you when needing your type of service.
Even for our widget man, you will know that you exhibit at the same exhibitions each year as you want to be seen, ignoring the fact that every other widget company is also showing its wares. A new you might be the answer. Perhaps, put your exhibition stand up in the back of a truck and use some of your two and a half days of work driving it to important prospects’ premises. Then perhaps it is not five-minutes attention from one visitor at the show, it might be all day for half the prospect’s staff. Wow. Half the company now lobbying for your widgets? Umm, we smell the money.
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.