People’s Problems Come Down to Attitudes
Often, people’s problems aren’t down to not caring, a bad attitude, or the wrong people. Most people’s problems come from poor design. And what I mean by this is that so many businesses drift into organisational structures. What starts as people being flexible and helping out can soon turn into chaos as a business grows and takes on more team members. If everybody is just mucking in and people don’t have clearly defined responsibilities, if reporting lines are all over the place, all of that leads to this lack of ownership, lack of clarity, and lack of good management.
Often, businesses will take people who have been there the longest and put them into managerial positions, instead of being really clear on what they actually need from their managers. That leads to additional problems. So all of these things are preventable, and all of these things aren’t because you have the wrong people in the business necessarily.
That may be the case, but in the first instance, it’s probably a design issue.
If your business feels like it’s just everyone’s working really hard, but nobody really owns anything, and things aren’t getting done as efficiently as they need to be, and people aren’t being managed correctly, then it is probably down to design.
So, what do you do about it?
If you find this content useful and want to see more of it, then please like, follow, subscribe or connect with Marco Soares, explore Mind Your Own Business, or subscribe on YouTube, depending on where you are watching. So, what do you do about it? Well, in the first instance, you need to start with the basics.
A properly structured organisational chart
A properly structured organisational chart. Spreadsheeting, you are legends. And what you need to do is not design your organisational chart for right here, right now. What you need to do is you need to think about what your business needs to look like over the next 12 months, maybe 24 months. And you need to get really clear on what the organisational structure needs to look like at that point. That way, you can start to be a bit more thoughtful and proactive about reporting lines. You can be more thoughtful and proactive about departments and how things should shape.
You could be a lot clearer on what recruitment decisions need to be made over the next 6 to 18 months, for example. All of this stuff is really important, but what I find is that it isn’t put at the top of the pile. It’s the questions and the challenges and all of those things that tend to take the owner’s bandwidth.
The managing director’s role
If you are the managing director of your business, you have three main responsibilities. Number one, you need to make sure that your business has a proper strategy. Number two, you need to make sure that the strategy is helping that business achieve its financial results.
And the third thing, you need to ensure that your business has the right team, the right structure to deliver the strategy. This is really important work, and it’s very easy to put it to one side because it isn’t simple.
It is complicated.
It needs bandwidth and thought. If your team is not set up properly, if responsibilities are all over the place, and you don’t have the right managers and the right reporting lines, you simply will not fulfil your potential as a business.
It is a fact. For more on this, you can also read Don’t Be the Bottleneck in Your Business and 3 Reasons Why Your Management Team Is Not Working.
Final thought
What do you need to do to get a bit clearer on what your business structure needs to look like? What do you need to do to make sure that the people that you hire are clear on what they own and what they don’t? What do you need to do to make sure that your business structure is future-proof?
See you next time on Mind Your Own Business.
