Signs You Need to Develop Additional Company Leadership
I don’t know anyone who is ambitious, driven, or above-average passionate about their work who hasn’t found themselves in the office (or plant, or field, or laptop at the kitchen table) at 9 p.m. or 4 a.m. on occasion. You want to get something done. You want to try something new. Or you need to fix something that went wrong. And I don’t know anyone who owns their own business for whom this isn’t a monthly, or even weekly, occurrence. Maybe more.
Work doesn’t always feel like work to you. You see what you’re accomplishing long before you notice how much time you’re spending.
This is a key, and often critical, trait of company builders. But it can sneak up on you. Once a week is one thing, and maybe twice you can handle for a while. Before you know it, you can’t remember the last time you were home in time for dinner. Or the last time you said good morning to your kids when they rolled out of bed.
Your business is running you, rather than you running your business.
Let me say this again: this is completely normal. Congratulations! You have a growing business that you enjoy working in, and it has reached a point where you need to develop additional leadership. This is a milestone to be celebrated, and a challenge to be attacked like every other challenge you’ve taken on in your journey.
The first step is to look closely at the things on your plate that keep you coming in early or staying late. Ask whether these tasks can simply be assigned to someone else, or to a new team member, without negatively impacting others. Maybe they can be automated, so they take far less time, or no time at all. Perhaps, if you think about them for a minute, they’re holdovers from earlier days and don’t need to be done anymore. That happens more often than you think.
If, however, the bulk of your workload consists of helping others stay on track, doing the right things the right way, as productively as possible, then you need leadership help.
Sometimes the signs aren’t quite as obvious. You don’t have to wait until you’re burned out to recognize the need for more leadership. Some of these indicators show up early in a company’s growth; others emerge later. All of them deserve attention. Here are a few examples:
When you leave for a few hours during the day and return, are you immediately bombarded with questions? Pay attention to what you’re being asked. It may be time to spend more time with certain people clarifying what decisions they can make on their own and which ones require your input. It’s also worth looking critically at what you might be doing, that encourages questions they could answer themselves.
Is the productivity of the team members doing the work you get paid for declining? This is core to the business—we’re talking about gross profit. You absolutely need to understand the root cause, but often it’s because people aren’t clear on what to do, when to do it, or how to do it. They may be redoing work to get it right, waiting too long to understand next steps, or stalled due to material shortages or poor coordination with other resources.
Are the front-line leaders you’ve already developed failing to coordinate well with each other? Are you starting to hear more bickering or disagreement? When something goes wrong, is there a tendency to blame other teams instead of working together to understand what really caused the problem?
Leadership, at its core, is about:
Making sure the team knows where it’s going, and why.
Breaking down and assigning responsibilities.
Ensuring each person knows their role and is capable and equipped to perform it.
Following up to confirm the team is accomplishing its goals, individually and collectively.
Many business builders are naturally good at this and may even enjoy doing it themselves. Others are more energized by doing the work itself or being out in the market with current and prospective customers.
Whatever the owner’s preference, leadership must happen for a business to operate well. The type and depth of leadership required varies with the nature of the work and the size of the company. It’s both common and understandable that, as a business grows, its leadership needs change.
When you start seeing these symptoms, or you find yourself wondering what you got yourself into, it’s time to explore alternatives to your current lack of, or incomplete, leadership structure.