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Mini Me or Maxi You?

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mini-me

When you teach, coach and instill a new way of thinking into every employee in your company, so that when employees are faced with any decision, they would do whatever YOU would do as the business owner or leader, you very quickly create a company which stands out in its market place as one which is attentive, alert and focused on its customers needs.

Richard Parkes Cordock

Richard Parkes Cordock produces great advice for managers and entrepreneurs.  I am an especially big fan of the Millionaire MBA programme.

However I think he has got this bit wrong.

I want to employ people:

  • who can do things that I can’t do,
  • who can see choices that I can’t see,
  • who act from their own unique perspective to take the action that they believe will be best for them and the business.

Success depends on diversity not a monoculture of mini mes.

Cicero and the Progressive Manager

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cicero

“If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.”

Cicero – Roman statesman

Hat tip to Steve Roesler.

Let’s get this straight from the start.  In my book persuading DOES NOT involve influencing employees to do something that is not in their best interest.  It involves helping them to see why the action proposed IS in their best interest.  Or to create a plan that we can all see the upsides from.

Thinking their thoughts

How do things look from their personal perspective – REALLY?  Have they worked in the organisation for 10 years and never made a promotion?  Are they more interested in the week-end than the working week?  Let’s try to be honest with ourselves about the thinking that our latest ideas might trigger.

Feeling their feelings

What do they really care about?  What matters most to them?  How do they feel about what matters?  Optimistic?  Resigned?  Detached?  Hopeful, fearful? DO they feel like they have to keep their head down and play it safe, or are they up for taking some risks in pursuit of greatness.  Are they comfortable in the bureaucratic comfort zone or do they prefer the white water of the entrepreneurial mindset.

Speak their words

Are your words clear and unequivocal – or are they weasel words – designed to create an illusion of clear communication?  Do you speak direclty to them clear about your own self interest and really prepared to re-negotiate it as they communicate reservations, concerns, hopes and desires?  Are you speaking their language?  If they are talking about fear of redundancy are you talking to those fears – honestly?

Connect or Collude

Do you really want to establish an honest connection or to collude in a pretense of communication that enable everyone to duck the real issue – ignore the 900lb gorillas?  Do you want to connect human to human or ‘work mask to work mask’? Do you want to communicate clearly what you stand for and what your best thinking is?  Are you really interested in their interests – or do you just want quiet compliance?

If the answer to the connection question is yes, human to human, naming the real issues, clear and powerful communication, honestly negotiating self interests then you are ready to communicate.  Face to face, up close and personal you will come across as caring, compassionate, honest (and if your thinking is good) capable.  Even if your thinking is not so great you are likely to elicit information that will help you to take it forward.

If on the other hand you would prefer the masks to stay on, to keep playing the management game the face to face is not going to work so well.

Your lack of commitment will ooze from every pore.

Your lack of compassion and clarity will be clear.

You will be filed in the ‘just another bureacrat’ drawer.

Mediocrity will prevail.

Enterprise Lessons from Jim Sinegal Costco Founder

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Jim Sinegal founded Costco 25 years ago.

This is a great post capturing some of what Jim learned about management, enterprise and entrepreneurship along the way.

Full of wisdom!

Shows that if you set up a small business in the right way – it can become massive.

The Creative Entrepreneur – WOW

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Good networking event last night hosted by WYLLN, bmedia and nti.

Explored a couple of questions:

  • In a fast-moving industry dominated by freelancers and SMEs, what does ‘Leadership & Management’ really mean?
  • Why is it important?

More prosaically put – why are so many creative/digital businesses poor at establishing basic business processes, managing other creatives and getting paid?

My opinion?

It is because we (the business support industry) insist on training digitals and creatives (and every other entrepreneur) that they have to do all this stuff if they are going to be successful in business.

And this is, frankly, nonsense.

It damages people.

It distorts them from their true purpose.

The challenge is being comfortable with who you are, what you want to become and what you want to spend your time doing.  Enterprise is a long term process of becoming, of exploring and realising potential.  And then finding people you can work with to do the rest.  It is about negotiating your self interest and building the right team.  All really successful business are team starts.

Why don’t we teach this?

  1. Find out what you love.  What you really love. Something that will keep you engaged for years while you strive for mastery and excellence.
  2. Get really good at it and keep getting better.  Specialise.
  3. Understand the importance of other things that you do not love.  Learn to respect and value them.  If you are a creative/digerati this is likely to be management, sales and marketing. (Most creatives and digitals have spent many hours over many years working alone honing their craft.  They tend to be introverted and uncomfortable with conflict.  Hence the aversion to management, sales and marketing.)
  4. Find other people who love doing the bits you hate.  Form a team.  A strong team. Form it with care. Take your time.  Unpicking the wrong team can be very expensive.
  5. Collaborate on developing a vision and an action plan for the business.
  6. Act – act often.
  7. Reflect and learn.

Simple.

DO NOT TRY TO DO IT ALL.  You will build a mediocre business.  You will find yourself falling out of love with large parts of it.

Dave Pannell from the Design Mechanics recognised that he would perhaps never have been a really great graphic artist (I think I heard you say that Dave).  And my guess is that this freed him up to run a great design business.  His job is to work on the business as it grows and to spend less time working in it.

Liz Cable from Reach Further is building an agile team of freelancers and employees covering all the main bases.  Balancing the demands of MD/entrepreneur working on the business, and passionate digerati working in the business is already a challenge.  Being  1.4 of an FTE is not sustainable.

I suspect that Liz will either have to spend more time in the MD role or find someone the team trusts to take this on, freeing her up to surf the wave of technology and its application to building better businesses.  Or she may find a way of balancing the two.  However if the growth plans she outlined are to be realised I suspect a decision one way or another will be required before too long.

You see the real job of the entrepreneur is to manage the art of becoming.  It is about the emergence of identity; building a life and a living – not the development of cash flow forecasts or the ticking of boxes on a competence framework.  And when we take this seriously we will develop much more powerful and engaging process for enterprise education and build more powerful, sustainable and great businesses.

We must remember that the Latin root of educate is ‘to lead out’.   Our job is to facilitate the emergence of identity – not to pour in the trivia of business skills.