Teamwork will make your dream work
Are your management team helping or hindering your business?
Geoff Gwynn looks at how you can evaluate your team.
Tell-tale signs of a weak or untrusted management team are when you get embroiled in the day-to-day operational minutia, where everyone looks at you to solve problems and your role is mainly answering queries and fixing the mistakes made by others.
Congratulations you have a management job requiring you to run hard to stand still, and about as far away as you can get from the entrepreneurial leadership role you envisaged.
The opposite happens when you have a solid management structure. Problems get fixed without your involvement, issues get addressed, mistakes happen less frequently, and the leader gets time to think, plan and look to the future.
If this resonates with you, breaking the cycle of operational chaos is crucial. As Jim Collins suggests in Good to Great, your organisation should ensure that “the right people are doing the right things right.”
Start with the right people
Do all of your direct reports have a clear and documented understanding of the top five most important requirements for success in the role they hold? Are there measurable criteria for assessing their performance? From experience this vital information and reporting is at best ambiguous and obscured by HR gobbledegook with no real measures of success.
Assuming you have a strategic plan or an idea of how your business needs to develop over the next three to five years, ask yourself this simple question of each team member using what you now know about them. Would you employ then again in the same position and trust them to grow the business in the coming years?” (Yes or No answers only allowed)
If, like many of the owners I ask this question to, you are desperate to use “yes but” or any other wording in your response by way of justification, it’s clear you have a potential problem child in the organisation who needs realigning or removing.
Yes this is harsh, but the old adages of “fish rotting from the head down”, or “one bad apple” are absolutely true in any organisation. Don’t be surprised when underperformance becomes acceptable and trickles down and across the business contaminating previously good apples.
Why should I bother?
- For you and your well-being. Dealing with repetitive issues and people that often make the same mistakes or silly errors becomes frustrating and mentally draining to the point of sheer exhaustion or worse.
- A smoothly run business makes less errors and is immediately more profitable, which in turn increases its value and desirability at the point you wish to exit.
- If you have the “right people – doing the right things – right” you have the time and the mental energy to plan the next phase of your entrepreneurial journey.
Take action now to foster a management team that enables, rather than hinders, your success. Contact the herd, particularly our HR specialise Chloe Carey, to see how we can help.