In small businesses that are trying to grow, or in new businesses that are getting started, a common problem that they experience is getting time to do the work needed to grow.
Small business owners and founders of start-ups often find themselves in patterns of doing the work themselves. The entrepreneurial mindset of getting dirty with the team and mucking in to make things happen is what made the company what it is today. Now they need to be focused on running the organisation, which they neither enjoy nor are good at.
This is necessary when the business is starting out and the team is small, but it is important at some point to realize that the role has changed, and that there is different work that needs to be done to start growing the business and making it sustainable in the longer run.
Being focused on the day-to-day operations of the business leaves little to no time to do this work. It can’t be done whilst operating the till all day, or designing and tweaking new products to sell, or driving the forklift to help in the warehouse. Therefore, a difficult but necessary change is required.
Some of the things that need to be prioritized are:
Addressing reoccurring problems and systematizing solutions for stability
Building the business
Addressing reoccurring problems
If as the owner or manager you are spending your days doing the operations of the business, and helping your team address the issues that arise throughout the day, then no one is doing the work of identifying the causes of these problems and ways to prevent them. They will therefore continue to happen and continue to keep you busy, and one becomes stuck in a cycle of being too busy managing the daily work to be able to identify and put in place anything to improve the daily work.
In the example of an owner run restaurant, the owner/manager spends the days on the floor helping behind the till, monitoring the tables and their waiters and interacting with customers. During the day the kitchen runs out of one of the dishes and so the owner must make a plan and apologize to customers who have ordered the dish already, and they are able to find a temporary solution. They know it is something that needs to be addressed because it is not the first stock problem they have had and won’t be the last, but then there’s a customer complaint and they go back to helping the rest of the day go smoothly. The stock management problem that may be a simple fix can never be addressed because there is no one in the business doing the work of diagnosing and improving systems and ways of working.
Building the business
In order to take a small business or start-up further than the initial phase of successful operation, there is work to be done to decide on how one wants the business to look going forward and then to decide how to get there. Not only do these decisions need to be made about expanding or refining the product portfolio, customer target markets and increased volumes, but also about internal aspects of the business that will be vital to the success of any such scaling effort.
As the business grows, changes will need to be made that are going to influence the culture of the business whether you want them to or not. As new roles are needed to do different kinds of work to deal with the growth, more people come on board to fill these roles and both of these things increase the complexity of running the business. How these roles and these people interact will shift the culture and so if one doesn’t put the work in to identify how you want the culture to look and how you want these new roles and new people to work together then as a founder or owner you will land up with a culture that you did not decide on but rather just allowed to form by accident.
As an example, as the organisation grows you may decide to bring someone in to the role of marketing manager, and give them a role description that requires them to identify and capture new target markets. If the work is not done to structure the roles and role relationships to include this new position, and clear systems are not put in place to ensure they are able to do the work that has been asked of them, they are going to struggle to be effective. People will continue to make decisions and work in the way they did before and ignore this new person.
Their authority will be undermined, your plans will fall apart, work will be duplicated, time will be wasted, and a negative culture starts to develop.
Types of work
All of these are examples of how there is different work needed by different people in an organisation to make it successful. The emergence of a need for different types of work is common to all businesses as they grow. The trick is how to manage this process appropriately and smoothly. There are numerous pitfalls along the way, ranging from a resistance to doing the work & bringing in resources, to overdoing things and layering on extra costs and noise. There are often problems with a reluctance to limit our freedom through useful systems and decision-making processes
These problems will grow with the business if not addressed effectively. We have seen the end result many times in large corporates full of meaningless work, expensive unused and despised procedures and far too many people. This is all very difficult to undo. Of course the result for some small businesses is collapse from conflict, burnout, overhead costs and poor work.
Systems Leadership Theory provides a proven framework for anticipating and appropriately addressing these challenges, for successful business growth.
If you want to discuss the how Systems leadership could help your business grow, reach out to us at HBA. We would love to connect!
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