Are you a leader of an organization or a business owner who feels you pretty much have to do everything yourself, that your team won’t do the work or they say they don’t have the time? Or maybe you are just a control freak that no one can do better than you, so you do it all yourself. If that’s you, you are not a business owner. You just have a glorified job with a whole bunch of responsibilities, because if one day you look to sell or transition the company to somebody else, it’s going to be very tough to get the price tag you’re looking for. Because if we take you out of it, you don’t have a business at all.
Here are some things to think about. Many times, when I start working with my clients where we start creating a vision, mission, and culture for the organization. Where we start creating SOPs, standing operating procedures, roles and responsibilities, and all these tools that create structure and synergy in an organization. Most of the time we have these conversations in the beginning, they feel like they have to do it all themself. However, as I started enrolling the leader and encouraging them to enroll and encourage their team to do it, the results were amazing.
One particular client and team were going through the exercise of creating their vision, mission, and culture, understanding that sometimes it could take several weeks or months to get it right. One day he gathered his entire team together for a meeting and they took on the culture exercise where they took the name of their company, listed the letters vertically, and started coming up with words for those particular letters. Then they started coming up with one-liners for each of the words. In two meetings they knocked it out of the park to when we had a call and reviewed the finished product, I got goosebumps.
They align with the culture of the organization in two meetings. The team created a culture of excellence. The owner’s biggest point of value from the call when we reviewed the culture was, “I’ve been thinking I have to do all this stuff myself. I don’t have to. My team’s there to help me.” Bravo!
Another 30-year business owner newer client, we’re in the process of documenting the SOPs, standing operating procedures for the business. He also assumed he would have to do it all himself. I coach him up on how to just have everybody on the team write out, exactly what the steps are a – z to perfect the procedures. Interesting was that this gentleman was a little frustrated because some of the procedures were wrong. However, I shared that’s okay. They were never in writing before. Now we take these procedures and perfect them while updating and training the team accordingly. Once again, the team did most of the work, we just tightened everything up. Then we went on to Roles and responsibilities, I coached him on how to instruct the team to take a little time on the weekend to write out exactly what their roles and responsibilities are which provided us with all the information to put their position agreements together.
Leverage is all about dividing and multiplying. Let’s say you’re a business owner that struggles with time. Imagine a pie with eight slices, if you take out a piece of the pie that represents time. You now master your time, create all the tools, the systems, and strategies for you to become much more effective with your time, much more intentional with your time, and you put that piece of the pie back in, that begins to impact the entire pie. You’re more efficient. You’re more intentional. You’re having better conversations. You’re asking more questions. You’re not putting your time where it doesn’t serve you. You become more productive. You now can teach your team to be efficient and effective with their time. That begins to affect the entire organization, the productivity, the revenues, the profits, the bottom line, everything.
Divide and multiply is all about leverage. Leverage is all about dividing and multiplying. If you’re a business owner who is struggling with doing everything yourself, simply stop it. Let your team help you with this process. They are waiting for you to step up to encourage and empower them to do more to help you do more, so you can be the business owner, leader, or CEO you need to be.
If you need a little bit more help doing this, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be happy to take you through some of the steps. But most importantly, if we own a business, we’re CEO, we are leaders. And leader has one job, a leader’s job is to build other leaders. And if you’re doing everything yourself, you’re not building leaders. You start empowering your team to have them align themself and embrace some of the strategies by doing the work themselves reporting to you and working together. Now you’re allowing them to step up. And sometimes when you give people the opportunity to step up, they just might surprise you in a very good way.
COACH MICHAEL DILL is an Award-Winning Certified Business Coach, global speaker, and published author. He is a proud Action Coach Franchise partner as well as the President of Power & Ice Wealth Creation a strategic leadership company that works with business owners, leaders, teams, and entrepreneurs to both develop a systematized and structured organization while accelerating their mindset, efficiencies, and effectiveness to grow both personally and professionally to achieve extraordinary results. He brings more than 40 years of business and entrepreneurial experience in his leadership, team training, and mentoring practice. Businesscoachmichaeldill.com