Is your team running the system you have built or are you still doing the work?
Do not confuse “management” for “bossing everyone around and getting to tell them what to do.”
No. That is not leadership. That is dictatorship and is also the fastest way to demotivate your team and drive your high performers right out the door. Been there? Lost a good one? Yeah… keep reading. You are in the right spot.
So what do you do?
Awareness of the “System” to be managed
Think of the baseball team with players each in their respective area managing their part of the field. Each teammate, if clear on their responsibility, will know where “the play” is and what needs to be accomplished. When the grounder gets shot towards the teammate on third base, they know to stop it, and get it over to first or second base to get the “out.”
No where in “the play” does it involve the coach leaving the bench to come field the grounder or make the catch at first base. So your first step is to notice when you are “on the field,” with your team. That might look like moving emails, boxes, materials or spreadsheets with your own hands.
A System of “Handoffs”
In your business, you probably have the following general functions
- Marketing
- Sales
- Fulfillment/Delivery
- Collections/Accounting
And at the beginning, your name is probably associated with each or many of those areas. But after a while, you have probably started hiring a teammate or two for help the work in one or more of those areas.
And so it begins, managing the coordination between the different areas. Not the people. You must begin to manage the system. The process of a new lead being contacted and engaged with, to then getting the paperwork/contract and information over to the team that is going to build/do the work and order all the materials. Then someone will have to communicate the timeline and expectation with the customer and coordinate who will be responsible for letting the others know at what interval along the way. Then it concludes with invoices being collected, the records being updated and the marketing team getting retriggered to engage once again for future work.
Don’t fumble during a relay race
Your business is a system of handoffs between departments and functions. A system of communications and expectations. Whether stated or not, your team starts to build a dependency and expectation on the person further up the process from them. And in the end, it will be up to the final members of the collections and administrative and accounting teams which will make sure that ALL of the work done up to that point is paid for and distributed accordingly.
So the questions to ask yourself are around what do those systems look like? Who is looking at them? What information is needed between those handoffs? How do the different teams know when the job is specifically handed off to them? How do they maintain the level of quality that our customers have started to expect from our brand? How do they maintain and manage the expectations of the customers? Of each other?
Solving for these questions and diagnosing where and how to solve them is what it means to be working “on” the business. It’s the handoffs and the backlog of expectations between departments.
- Got a production backlog? There’s a communication breakdown.
- Short on cash? There’s a timing issue getting sales closed and turned around fast enough.
- Short staffed? There’s a lack off efficiency somewhere in the process that’s bogging down too much time relative to the amount of hours and the team available.
This is where your job as the “owner/manager” will start to shift into illuminating and making that system visible and actionable for the team.
How you know you are doing it right
Have you built a system of process maps? A check list for steps needing to be completed before the team can pass the job to the next department? What about a documented communication trail? Does the next teammate know when their job starts and when to pick up the work? Are you continually and consistently profitable? Do your teammates tell you they’ve “got it,” and if you step back, could they handle it?
This is now going to become your sweet spot. The connections between the departments and identifying the bottlenecks in your system rather than just the doing of the job between the “handoffs.”
How you know you are about to make huge improvements
Is your team standing around while you are moving stuff with your hands? Are you writing the communications? Is your team bringing you problems to solve?
Every leader goes through a transition where they realize that they have to stop “solving problems” and instead, start empowering and asking their team to propose solutions. And then, right at the moment where the leader is going to tell the teammate what to do and how to do it… the leader stops. They pause. They might ask one more clarifying question to their teammate and then having been asked to propose a solution or consider the extra tidbit of information, their teammate shows the gratifying moment of an illuminated insight. Now with the solution illuminated, they are able to quickly action the solution having been coached to solve their own problem on the spot.
The leader might ask, “what do you think we should do?” or “how do you propose we solve this?” and in that moment, the leader has raised the bar for their team and the team now starts to reach and stretch for this new responsibility of coming and proposing solutions.
Does it work immediately? No.
Is it going to be clunky at first? Absolutely.
But if it’s uncomfortable, it means you are growing and this is where the magic of leadership and business management start to align.
Are you surrounded by leaders and advisors challenging you to think this way or start to look at your operation as a system of handoffs? Find folks who think the way you want to or that run businesses the way you want to see yours running. It’s the best way to give yourself the best chance at benefiting from the proximity of spending time with those leaders.
And if you do not have a group to bounce the kinds of ideas off of that are going to push you and stretch your thinking, contact us. We would love to be a resource or recommend some tools or advisors that might be a good fit for our operation.