When you own your business, it is your sandbox. You get to decide who plays in it and what happens inside. Just remember that these decisions also have consequences. As an advisor to my clients, my role is to help them understand the consequences of their choices and actions. I’ve often observed people making decisions with which I disagree. Sometimes I am right, and sometimes I am wrong about what happens next. My track record is usually rather good, but far from perfect. I want to ensure that these decisions are informed and well thought out. I am fine with being pleasantly surprised by satisfactory results that I didn’t foresee or anticipate. I also learn from these situations – never underestimate the resolve and creativity of a committed leader. Most importantly, I strive to ensure that these decisions are aligned with the outcomes the client is aspiring to achieve. Success can be defined in many ways, and unless there is a moral or ethical component, it is not my role to judge.
I am constantly amazed by people and situations. It’s rare for someone to consistently operate from their gut and/or avoid basic business principles, and good things always transpire. Moreover, it’s remarkable how many leaders have “blind spots” about their people. You cannot ignore reality for too long. Inevitably, the lack of real thought, logic, or understanding ends up catching up with you. Some leaders can go a long time before this happens, but they often don’t see or ignore the cracks in the foundation. There is nothing sadder to me as a business advisor than to watch someone conclude one day that the vision they had for their business and themselves is no longer achievable. Time is finite, and some mistakes become far too challenging to overcome. Being a perpetual optimist only works if you have the necessary time to act and if the actions have some chance of working. If you are not careful, you end up with minimal options when this happens.
Here are some significant challenges I’ve seen well-intentioned leaders create for themselves while managing their sandbox:
- Hiring and promoting family members or friends who are ill-equipped to be successful at their jobs.
- Expecting from people what they are incapable of delivering – you can’t put in what was left out.
- Playing favorites with the wrong employee, choosing loyalty or personal compatibility over competence.
- Being too casual with employees can degrade your leadership position.
- Surrounding yourself with “yes” men and women rather than building a management team of competent professionals who provide constructive feedback and help you avoid the dangers of “groupthink.”
- Spending most of your leadership time on or with your problem employees rather than your superstars.
- Making the work culture a democracy rather than a meritocracy – valuing everyone’s opinion equally.
- Overly valuing employee tenure rather than rewarding performance.
- Solving the hard problems for their direct reports rather than pushing them to learn to resolve these issues for themselves.
- Letting your employees’ personal problems become your own, or allowing them to become problems that adversely affect the business.
- Keeping/hiding bad financial results from their bank instead of bringing the matter to their attention and asking for advice/help.
- Using debt or overly burdening the business cost structure to fund a personal lifestyle that the business model cannot deliver.
- Undercapitalizing a new business initiative (or even the business as a whole) means being under constant cash flow pressure.
- Jumping into a new business opportunity without conducting adequate due diligence and planning first.
- Waiting too long to adjust the existing business model to reflect new market realities.
- Forgetting to maintain an ongoing two-way feedback loop with customers, failing under the spell of “we know best what our customers need.”
- Bringing on the wrong equity partners and/or unnecessarily diluting their own equity.
- Waiting too long to exit an underperforming entity/idea.
- Not having an exit or succession planning strategy.
- Not being on the same page with your spouse/partner in terms of what life balance, happiness, and success look like.
I could spend the better part of a day further populating this list, but these results are what initially jump out at me. Your business is your sandbox, but be careful how you design it, maintain its structural integrity, who you let in, and the culture that develops once they arrive.
Related articles
- Leadership Qualities Which Can Upgrade an Organization (leadershipskillsdevelopement.wordpress.com)
- Be the Boss: Managing Your Business, Your Employees and Your Time (staples.com)
- Do You Open the Door to Employee Feedback? (sowhatwouldyousay.wordpress.com)
- How to Build Trust in Leadership (csrtransblog.wordpress.com)