Aspiring new business owners often have formidable technical expertise, key to developing a new product or service, but a great naïveté in management skills.
They run into difficulty when their business reaches the million-dollar annual sales range or their employee count exceeds a few. It’s here that owners must shift their thinking from tactical and operational, to strategic and managerial.
I’m convinced that management is a learnable skill. It can come from experience, or training in a prior company.
It can even be self-taught from the Internet by smart professionals, just like they learn to establish a company, negotiate a contract, or file a patent.
There are also many books on this subject, including this classic from the master of management, Brian Tracy, Full Engagement!: Inspire, Motivate and Bring Out the Best in Your People. In it, he outlines a long list of key management principles for success. I’ve extracted here some key ones from my own experience relevant to businesses just entering the growth stage
1. Communication clarity is essential
Management is “getting results through others,” not doing it yourself with the assistance of others. That means your chief responsibility is to communicate clearly about what you need done, and who has the responsibility to do it. Your new team doesn’t automatically know what you are thinking.
2. Planning has priority over doing
Planning is one of the key learning areas, in moving from a doer to a manager. Your ability to plan, to think through what needs to be done, in advance, on paper, is a critical skill that largely determines your entire future. Your job moves to determining what should be done, instead of how it should be done.
3. Organize your work before you begin
Most new businesses first focus on creation and think about organization later. Organizing means bringing together the necessary resources, and assembling the right people, then assigning work to specific people to be accomplished at specific times to specific standards of performance.
4. Delegate effectively and often
Delegation doesn’t work when you are creating your new venture. ‘Not delegating’ doesn’t work when you are growing it later. Remember that delegation is not abdication. It’s still your company, so you have to follow up, step in for disaster recovery, and keep the interplay between tasks and organizations working.
5. Staff properly at every level
This is not the same as finding a partner with complementary skills to start your business. It means not only hiring but also training and measuring performance. It means mentoring less experienced team members, and quickly replacing incompetent staff members. These are all skills you can learn.
6. Focus on high productivity
For growth and success, you need to continually look for ways to increase output, while lowering costs. That’s a big step from one product to one customer.
The three R’s for attaining higher productivity are reorganization, re-engineering and restructuring. No business professional is born with all these skills.
7. Set the standard with visible actions
You can only lead by example and set equally high standards for the people around you. You learn and gain credibility by committing to excellence and asking customers and team members for feedback and ideas.
8. Concentrate on the important tasks
All successful managers never forget to concentrate on their most important task and stay with it until it is done. As a business grows, it’s easy to try to do too many things at once, while doing nothing particularly well.
9. Identify constraints and their source
Between you and any goal is a constraint setting the speed at which you achieve that goal. The best managers are the most creative in overcoming constraints.
Constraints follow the 80/20 rule – eighty per cent are from the inside, and 20 per cent are from the outside. You need to tell the difference.
10. Concentrate on continuous improvement
No static company can grow or survive. Continuous improvement requires strategic planning to set new objectives and work toward them. Every growth company needs to innovate continually, maybe spending 20 per cent of its revenues on research and development.
Some business professionals, on seeing all this, will decide they have no interest in being a manager. They should voluntarily bow out early, to join another business.
Others will get pushed out, with some pain, by investors who see the need for a new team to lead the growth stage. Even more painfully, too many others won’t change their style, resulting in everyone being unhappy, and a business that stagnates, or even fails.
Things that great professionals have in common with great managers are that both are results-oriented and action-oriented. They have a sense of urgency and move quickly. Thus it should be easy to apply those attributes to the learning required for the next stage of your company. Just start now, and do it!
Source: Inc.Africa
Author: Martin Zwilling