… and no I’m not talking equity
rather your role?
I heard a great nugget recently from Anthony Fletcher, the CEO of fast-growing business Graze.
“If you plan to grow your business by 30% you have to find someone to do 30% of your own job”
The inability to consistently prune your own role (and then everyone else’s) is one of the biggest inhibitors to growth. As your team gets bigger everyone’s role will need to get narrower. Yet for a myriad of reasons we hang onto stuff.
Is it a belief that;
- No one can do it better than you
- It will take too long to train someone else to do it and it’s quicker to just crack on
- It will be an additional cost (which is, of course, a false economy if you understand your own true hourly rate and the opportunity cost of you hanging onto stuff)
- The hard truth – that you just enjoy doing it … whatever ‘it’ is
Personally, when it comes to pruning, I know I’m still a work in progress. (I also know Lara will be reading this and chuckling to herself that I’ve chosen this topic as this week’s blog – people in glass houses ‘n’ all that!)
I can and do prune, but then somehow find new stuff to fill up my time … things, which are not always the best for the business.
This behaviour’s called …
The competency trap – doing the wrong things really well
As a leader you need to maintain an awareness of what you chose to give your time to, bearing in mind that the ‘wrong things’ you are doing today, may have been the right things’ to get you from where you were, to where you are now, BUT by continuing to personally perform these tasks you will hold the business where it is now, stifling growth.
Can you identify the bottlenecks in your business? What are you personally holding up? What do you need to get rid of? What do your team need to prune?
Make a list tonight of 5 things you will pass down to your team, or outsource, or use technology to simplify, or ditch altogether, allowing you to focus on the things that will enable growth.
Personally, I look at my following two weeks detailed scheduled every Sunday evening and literally go through that list and delegate as much as possible, at least half of it.
Going back to Andrew’s point, what’s your growth percentage this year and have you planned to find someone else to take on the corresponding percentage from your current role not just on an ad-hoc basis but in a structured way.
Plan it now. Who do you need to involve? Who do you need to recruit? Who needs to step-up?