Words: Chuck Violand
Small businesses grow at the same rate as their owners. It’s a proven fact. If you want to grow your business, you must start by growing yourself. This concept is straightforward, but it’s not easy. Let’s break it down.
New or smaller companies
These companies typically include a solo operator or one with a small number of employees.
Most of the training or development will focus on the company’s technical elements. Things like becoming proficient in the actual services they provide, such as cleaning, deodorising and drying.
However, let’s not forget financial management. This might mean understanding the company’s chequebook is not for personal use, learning to read financial statements, studying how to sell their services to customers, researching how to hire staff and discovering how to balance workflows with their workforce.
These are all learned skills. New owners transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship must learn them – often the hard way.
Midsize companies
These companies may have between half a dozen and a dozen employees. They’re beyond the launch phase. One or two people may have been given the title of manager, but they may just be relatives or loyal employees the owner wants to reward.
These owners typically have a good understanding of the technical elements of their job, at least the cleaning and restoration pieces. However, these leaders need to learn to identify and retain effective managers, as they can no longer manage the entire business themselves. This is totally different from managing front-line people.
A larger company
This size company would be one with a couple of dozen, or even dozens, of employees. This owner has an entirely different set of leadership development issues than the sole operator.
While it is important to improve an owner’s technical skills, such as understanding financials, marketing, market trends and new technology, much of the essential work at this stage involves internal matters, particularly mental and emotional aspects.
At this point, skills, such as empathy, communication, collaboration and gaining a greater awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as understanding how your peers or subordinates perceive you, come into play. Learning to think strategically, as well as operationally, and how to coach rather than command are essential skills to have. These are the areas that need to be developed or refined in owners at this level.
Adding staff
Let’s revisit the three different size companies we discussed and examine how the needs of the people they’re hiring at each level vary.
The smaller company: Many of the first hires are friends or relatives of the owner, or they’re people who need jobs. In newer companies, you don’t usually attract employees who have grand dreams of climbing a corporate ladder or building careers in management. Most are more concerned with making enough to pay their rent, feed their families, and maybe earn enough overtime money to attend a sporting event. These days, you’ve got to work a lot of overtime to do that!
At this level, their most significant concerns are: Will I get paid this week? Will I have a job next year? Do I get along with my boss?
At this level, the owner seeks individuals who are consistent, reliable and produce high-quality work. They usually stand out. Rather than anointing someone who fits these criteria as a manager too soon, start with smaller responsibilities. Both the owner and the employees are learning how to dance together, and there’s often a lot of collateral damage through this learning process at both this level and the next.
The owner also needs to realize that their people are not like them. They may not be as driven as they are or be motivated by the same things. So, the owner wants to learn to see things through their eyes, including the way they manage their business.
The midsize company: This is the one with approximately a dozen employees. This company is in the early stages of having a management team. Therefore, the owner must develop skills in recognising managerial talent and learn how to work effectively with them.
Owners should work on their ability to communicate clearly and regularly, which is often more frequent than they’re comfortable with.
This means not only being firm, fair and consistent in how they deal with their employees, but also being firm, fair, and consistent in how they enforce the company’s values. In other words, do they follow the same rules they expect their people to follow? Or do they claim executive privilege whenever it becomes inconvenient to do so? This is a basic discipline that many business owners learn the hard way.
But let’s not forget about their ability to build a team that will allow them to step away from the business. This includes having the discipline to not just settle for hiring marginal people simply because they need a warm body. But instead, looking for the right people with the correct skills and values with which to build the company.
The larger company: This is the one with a few dozen or more employees. At this stage, an owner may need to abandon some behaviors that contributed to their success in the company’s early stages but no longer serve them. Things like a “command and control” mindset or the need to be seen as the smartest guy in the room. At this stage, the owner needs to shift from being the one with all the answers to being the one with the best questions. This requires a significant amount of internal work on the part of the owner – a lot of which involves self-awareness and ego management.
Have they built trusting relationships, both professionally and personally, with the people in their organisation? Have they created a work environment where people can feel safe and fail without being criticised for it or marginalized in their jobs?
Owners at this level need to observe the calibre of questions they receive from their team members. If they’re still getting elementary-level questions, it’s usually not because their people aren’t intelligent. It’s because the owner hasn’t given their team room to ask better questions.
They need to learn to listen between the lines and embrace the diversity of thought and opinions to continue succeeding at this level.
It’s through these kinds of things that owners build loyalty with their people, allowing them to lead a business rather than have it run them.
This article first appeared in Cleanfax.
