The Overworked Owner

LEAP have been working with business owners for almost 20 years and in that time we have learned 3 things that challenge all business owners and senior managers.

• Firstly, the people at the top are too busy caught up in the day to day running of the business. There time is absorbed by operational issues that should be dealt with by their staff. This prevents the owner from spending time on the things that matter, growing the business, creating more efficiency, developing the team etc. This is the main reason that company performance plateaus or slows down.
• The second issue is that the people around you could do more…..not work harder but smarter. Most business do not have focus and discipline and measurable progress. You need to develop the business disciplines that ensure people hold themselves responsible for delivering results. This will lead to individuals becoming accountable. In turn it will also expose poor organisation structure and lack of clarity of who should be doing what. You need to build in clear accountability, measurement of performance and then have the discipline to follow through on a regular basis. This approach can transform the culture of a business. It will also expose where the weakness are and your role as the leader is to support, provide resources and coach your staff. This will allow you to step away from the day to day activities that currently drain your energy.
• The third area we find that needs attention is your processes. Every aspect of your business is a process and lots of bad habits have developed, some people do thing their own way, crisis management and fire-fighting becomes the norm. Through reviewing your processes you will highlight these areas of inefficiency, duplication and mistakes. You must then engage the people to carry out root cause analysis so that problems are fixed once and for all. They say fire-fighters carry their own box of matches, people like to be heroes and knowledge is power. There will be resistance to becoming more reliant to the process than to the individual but again this in key to developing a high performance business.