Last week, we talked about ON versus IN and how you need to build a team to give you more ON. Well, this week I’m going to talk about buses.
– Next stop: ON your business! This week on “Mind Your Own Business,” I want to talk to you about building your bus
What am I on about? There’s a fantastic book called “Good to great” by someone named Jim Collins, and in this book, he explores this concept of the bus.
The bus is your business, and on your bus, you have various seats, and those seats represent the different roles in your business and what you need to understand is, do you have the right seats on the bus? Then you need to know if you’ve got the right people sitting on those seats, then you need to understand if you’ve got any empty seats on the bus ultimately, you then need to make sure that you’ve got the right people on the bus.
So essentially, people who are the right culture fit people with the correct values to be part of your team; it is the first part of this concept that I wanted to explore with you in this week’s video: Do you have the right seats on your bus?
This is so, so important it is a foundational element of having a high-performance team if you do not have an organisational structure that is well thought out with clear lines of responsibilities with each seat understanding precise outcomes that they need to achieve with obvious KPIs then you are not going to have a team that is capable of high performance because they don’t know what performance looks like and this is one of the areas that small businesses often fail at and that’s because when your business is small when you have a minor team, you are closer to the front line.
Hence, you kind of know what’s going on; the team is small enough to communicate and loop everybody into what’s going on, and everything kind of works. However, then as you become bigger as you add more people to your bus, things then start to break down because you are removed from the front line; you don’t necessarily know exactly what’s going on.
People might not know precisely what they’re supposed to be covering because they might assume that other people have things covered and then people just kind of start to go through the motions of trying to do their best without very clear guidelines on what the best looks like.
So if you can relate to this and find that you’re getting pulled into the day-to-day issues and bottlenecking decisions and getting pulled into things that you’re paying other people to do, then this is an area that you’re going to want to address. So, look at your organisational chart make sure that those seats are in the right places to support your growth goals.
Make sure that everybody on the bus understands what seats they are responsible for because next week, we’ll look at making sure you’ve got the right people on those seats in the first place and what you need to do about the empty seats on your bus.
If you’re looking for more small business tips, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”
Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing these tactics.
