Successful delegation requires the right culture. If your staff are overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, feeling unloved and underpaid, resentful towards management (that is, towards you)…don’t try to delegate stuff to them. If that is the situation in your business then chances are that you too are feeling overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, unloved and underpaid…and resentful towards your staff. This is a recipe for a downward spiral. How then to break out of this situation?  And break out of it you must, or things will just get worse and health, wealth and happiness will become a distant memory. The fundamental basis for successful delegation is trust.  You must trust your staff to be willing and able to do the right thing for the business - and in order for this to be true they must trust you to be willing and able to do the right thing by them. If you feel there is a lack of trust between you and you can see that delegati...

Some of my business owner clients look shifty when leadership comes up in the conversation.  They don’t see themselves as leaders – even though they are. I explain that leadership doesn’t mean they have to suddenly become Napoleon or Gandhi, but it might help them to understand what leadership looks like and do the things that leadership requires.  The quality of the leadership will to a large extent decide the success of a business. Google returns over 244 million pages when you search for “leadership books”.  Amazon returns over 60,000 titles.  The subject has been fascinating people for thousands of years.  We all know it when we see it, and recognise when it is absent, but a practical, implementable definition remains elusive. The development of leadership thinking and research over the last few decades can be summarised as: First, people started by examining leadership traits Leaders were born Certain traits recurred, like intelligence, empathy, confidence ...

Often when talking to clients about delegation they work around to telling me that one barrier is “I don’t trust my employees”.  My normal response is to ask “Do you think they trust you?”  We generally then get to the point that my client isn’t accusing her staff of stealing her sandwiches from the kitchen fridge, or selling company secrets online – it’s just that they don’t think they care enough or understand enough to be trusted with more responsibility. If your staff are overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, feeling unloved and underpaid, resentful towards management (that is, towards you)…don’t try to delegate stuff to them. If that is the situation in your business then chances are that you too are feeling overloaded, fed up with getting grief from unhappy customers, unloved and underpaid…and resentful towards your staff. This is a recipe for a downward spiral. How then to break out of this situation?  And break out of it you must, or things...

Building a business is a choice that business owners make every day.  Some invest time in the long-term and create repeatable processes and accountable employees.  Others remain chained to the wheel of circumstance. I was talking recently to a client about delegation and helping staff take more responsibility. Like many owners, she has become something of a bottleneck in her business, with most decisions and some critical activities reliant upon her. I explained how implementing things like organisation charts, job descriptions, processes and objectives helps to empower employees, by making their responsibilities and authority clear. Her immediate reaction was “I can get our HR consultant to do that.” I commended this piece of delegation but had to point out that, while an HR consultant was exactly the right person to create the templates, advise on best practice and record and publish the results, the actual discussions with employees were far too important to be left to a th...

Whilst preparing a client proposal recently I referenced an HBR paper on the stages of business growth (The Five Stages of Small Business Growth by Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis  link ). It’s rather old but remains, like all good management models, relevant today. It provides a useful tool for gaining insight into an individual business, its stage of development, strategy and challenges. It also remains somewhat inaccessible to the owners of small businesses, who might see it as theoretical or even corporate. Their small businesses are not big enough to afford the shamens required to think about and apply these frameworks. From the practical, over-worked perspective of a business owner, the theories don’t look like their business. They must be talking about someone else. That led me to wondering about what a model that they would find useful might look like. I came up with a three-stage model: Stage 1: The business owner controls and does everything Stage 2: The business ...

A while ago, one of my clients was approached by an old colleague who now sells software. Specifically, BI or business intelligence software. It seems to be one of a raft of products aimed at SMEs and purported to help owners make sense of data. The salespeople (or avatars) usually refer to this as “big data”, whether it is or not. They do this while demonstrating lots of brightly-coloured graphs, each of which can be rotated, sliced and diced, drilled into, overlaid, reformatted…a salesperson’s dream. The business owner watches with glazed eyes – here, surely, is a cure to all those productivity problems and quality problems and control problems. It is of course much simpler nowadays to find, extract, link and manipulate data from an organisations’s computer systems. Most cloud-based systems will have an application programming interface (API) that allows data to be extracted. Even clunky old systems like Sage (still used by many small businesses) have this sort of facility. However, ...

Your omputer systems should do two things:  1) help you get the job done and 2) provide useful management information that underpins decisions. For instance, in a project tracking system, recording the status of each project and the date that it changed can create a simple traffic-light system that shows at a glance where things are going awry. Extrapolating from the specific to the general: All businesses can be thought of as a series of flows and balances (or pipes and buckets if you prefer). Management information tracks the speed of these flows, the volume of flow and the level in the buckets.  Examples of flow volume are number of new enquiries per day, value of invoices issued per month or, in my client’s case, projects completed per week.  Examples of flow speed are average project duration, sales lead-time or quote turnaround time.  Examples of levels are debtors, or quote bank, or cash in the bank. Every part of your business can be thought of in this way....