Business Leadership 19: Managing and Delegating

This continues our series on the roles and traits of leadership that improve your business

An early mentor defined management as “the accomplishment of predefined objectives through others”. In time, I added “Leaders determine the objectives, and then inspire others to accomplish them on their own”. Leaders set predetermined objectives and inspire. Managers accomplish. Both do it through others.

Leading and Managing

Corporations separate leadership (CEO) and management (COO). As you start your business, you fulfill the roles of technician, manager, and leader. Unfortunately, you may focus on your technician role and hesitantly manage, while ignoring leading. This stagnates your business. Leadership develops the vision and moves the business forward.

You must delegate for your company to grow. As the leader/manager you:

• Establish the vision for the company and see that others share the vision and make it happen.
• Create the processes that produce, market, sell, deliver, and account for your product or service and ensure that others fulfill those processes
• Establish and monitor the key metrics that inform you of progress towards your vision, praise your staff for good work, and help people improve as needed
• Analyze market trends, new technology, competition, and your clients to improve your product and service; then direct others to implement the changes

How much of the technical work can you do and still fulfill all of these responsibilities?

Delegating Management

Eventually, you must delegate even the management of your business to someone else so that you can lead. Hold your general manager or COO accountable for the outcomes or results of the work.

You need to focus on the vision, improvements, and growth of the company. A friend owns a 50 year old business. Two years ago, he saw a vision that will expand his business by millions of dollars. Managing the business, his comfort zone, stalled the progress on the newer vision. He wrestles to release day-to-day management, and consequently delays moving the company to greater revenues.

Hanging onto the familiar can cost the growth of your business.

Thursday we tackle the issue of how fear and self-doubt frequently affects leadership