EMPOWERMENT OR HOW TO MAINTAIN FORWARD MOMENTUM AND ACHIEVE GROWTH

Guy Norgrove

“Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.”

The path to success is strewn with good intentions, to paraphrase a well know saying, but many of you will know there is no single recipe that guarantees a way through. And whilst it might be useful in a voyeuristic way to track the habits and obsessions of the rich and famous, business is more about finding out what works best for you and your potential customers.

In this months article I will be exploring the issue that chokes many a small business: Trust. How to empower, delegate, allow to fail. In growing any business, the power of The Team must be engaged fully or burn out will quickly follow in a morass of micro-management and broken promises. By sticking to some very straightforward principles, this can be avoided. You don’t buy a dog and then bark yourself, do you? But, as I said earlier, see what works best for you.

Till next time.

EMPOWERMENT OR HOW TO MAINTAIN FORWARD MOMENTUM AND ACHIEVE GROWTH

You would think that the world had indeed ended if you listened only to the news and professional pundits, and of course it fits their bill to big up the worst of the stories. It sells whatever they have to sell and let’s face it, it seems that nearly everyone sits up and takes notice of bad news but just glides over the good stuff. Such is life, but the more discerning of you will know that the gross excesses of a bunch of bankers and an out of touch government & opposition have not and could not change the laws of physics, economics or anything really.

So how does this apply to your business? I am mainly addressing the Small Medium sector here, but very much like Mrs T in the 80s, if you treat the national economy the same way you treat your household budget you won’t go far wrong, so this also applies to large enterprises; it just isn’t as urgent in the bigger ones.

With most smaller enterprises, from say, 5 employees up to about 35 or so, the main daily fight is the chasing down of cash, followed nearly equally urgently by the chasing down of new orders and the fulfilment of existing ones. This does not leave much time, if any it seems, to focus on the bigger picture of how to reel in the future and address the opportunities that growth would provide. In reality, dealing with THE NOW is all most people can handle.

In many organisations of this size there is a simple reason for this inability to look to the future: EMPOWERMENT.

Now I don’t want to call anyone’s baby ugly, but a lot of owner led businesses can only focus on THE NOW because they fail to EMPOWER the people they employ to help them deal with it.

They persist in having a finger in every part of the pie and hesitate to listen to any external or internal advice as to how things might be improved. This ensures that nearly 100% of the owners time is spent on THE NOW, and 0% is spent on where they should be going, getting to, reaching, or achieving.

There are lessons to be learnt from large corporations in this area. In many successful growing businesses a small number of high achievers actually earn more than the “boss”. Does the boss care? Not if (s)he has any sense. His targets are being met and exceeded, his plan starts to look achievable and, because he has EMPOWERED people to get on with an aspect of the business at which they are better than himself, his time is freed up to look at other issues. Such as GROWTH and LEADERSHIP.

Many leaders find it difficult to TRUST. Rather than allow other people to (potentially) fail, their first instinct when a problem arises is to get stuck in and do it themselves, just because they cannot put their TRUST in the very people they have hired.How can this be when they themselves have hired these people to execute a particular role? The probability is that one of the following has occurred:

1. They have hired good people and then kept them in the dark, expecting them to be almost clairvoyant in working out how to do the job. Being good people who care about failing, they leave.
EXPENSIVE
2. They have hired poor people, “Yes” people who pose no threat, and then exercised “Command & Control “ on them, leaving them ill equipped to use any initiative, and remaining a “do-the-barest-minimum“ resource. These people become internal terrorists because they don’t feel valued and are the “jobsworth” of inter departmental co-operation. They don’t leave.
EXPENSIVE
3. They have hired people on price, and then ask them to do a job they are ill equipped to complete to anyone’s satisfaction. They don’t leave but the customers do, because nothing gets done properly.
EXPENSIVE

Expensive both in terms of money and TIME, because in any of the above scenarios the leader has to get involved in the NOW to get things fixed, leaving little or no time for the future.

There is no one size fits all answer to this issue, but there are ways to improve a less than ideal situation.

This blog has also been posted on Guy’s page at The Academy for Chief Executives and at Fresh Business Thinking

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