Chris Green (lead image), author of Business By Design, is an entrepreneurial strategist, author, mentor and facilitator with more than twenty years’ experience helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. In this guest post, Green says a organisation’s people are still its best asset…
New products and innovation can come from any number of sources be it a customer looking for a bespoke product or service, an opportunistic mistake that leads to a breakthrough or more often than not, an inspired team member that recognises a need. As a business strategist I see this all the time as ideas become concepts and ultimately are commercialised.
Stop Turning Up to a Job
If a business is to evolve and grow to achieve long term success it must harness all its resources, most notably its people. The challenge in practically doing this is for many business owners is, they turn up to their businesses everyday like they are turning up to a job. That is, operating as the technician in their business. They are involved in many of the operational decisions, are task focused and mostly reactive to what’s coming at them in the day to day. This creates a bottleneck that ultimately chokes the growth of the business. The business will not be able to scale beyond the hard work of the owner.
A vicious cycle then ensues. Many business owners find themselves trapped under what I term the entrepreneurial ceiling. Their business fortunes porpoise up and down based on their energy levels. They feel trapped and end up tinkering around the edges, but this rarely results in sustainable change. The challenge is, even if we recognise that we have become the bottleneck in our business it can be difficult to know what to do about it.
The Entrepreneurs Shift
As a starting point, the first step is to recognise that what got you to here is not going to get you there. To progress beyond you as the bottleneck and release the entrepreneurial potential of your team requires a different approach, a different mindset. You must lean into a new role, a role that is likely uncomfortable for you, a more strategic role.
To get clear on how your transformation will play out, draft a position description that clearly outlines the responsibilities, and key performance indicators of your new role. Now, with the new parametres set, it’s time to leverage your knowledge. To execute on this new way of doing business, other people will have to have delegated operational responsibilities away from you. Use your team to harness new ideas and create clear reporting lines through the organisation chart, ensuring everyone feels supported, valued and engaged.
Get Creative
Capture yours and your team’s precious business knowledge that forms your unique intellectual property through the creation of robust business systems. Get the technical expertise out of yours and the teams heads and into an operating system. This will not only refine the operating processes making them fit for purpose and robust but will also build the capacity of those in the business. You never know, in undertaking this process you will likely gain surprising insights that could lead to product breakthroughs and innovation.
It is important that you make this process as frictionless as possible. Use screen capture technology, video on your phone or some other method that makes it easy to record your operating system so that in the heat of battle, you have the means to empower your team when every bone in your body tells you just to do it yourself.
It is often said that our people are our greatest asset, however it is rarely articulated how we can truly maximise their impact in our business. The key to creating great products and services that enable us to stay ahead of the competition is creating a working environment and communication cadence that harnesses the collective wisdom of the team. This leads to continuous improvement and a dynamic agile business with more engaged team members.
It is in leveraging the business owner’s operational knowledge and realigning their role in the business, whilst harnessing the creativity of the group that we achieve sustainable competitive advantage. This process creates businesses which are innovative, sustainable, growth orientated and ready to transition beyond the entrepreneurial ceiling. Whilst for many this seems a daunting quest, the reality is that it is a well-worn path treed by every entrepreneurial business that has scaled beyond its owner.
