New year round the corner, recession in the works, and a burgeoning need for our businesses to step up and meet environmental and social goals as they meet their commercial ones.
Who said running a business was easy?
Here’s what I’d look at:
*FIRST*
Make sure your business-as-usual is working well. You will not be able to do anything strategic or longer-term if you and your leadership team have to drop everything and firefight every other week, or if the business can only run if you and your leadership team spend all your working hours operationally.
*SECOND*
Get clarity, alignment and consistency about where you’re going.
Picture your team each in charge of an oar on a rowing boat. You’ve not only failed to agree on where you’re going, but you’ve also blindfolded them. And each member has a different strength, sense of rhythm, ambitions of where to go. Oh, and some have rubber oars. With holes in them.
And at random intervals, you shout out a new destination. Which has little to do with the last one.
Now try to get that boat anywhere sensible….
*THIRD*
Create momentum. Momentum is your friend when it comes to both keeping your operational business ticking over, and making strategy happen.
But stop-start is how most businesses, especially SMEs, run.
It feels like this.
Your team of four rows their heart out for a few minutes, then stops, then two of them restart and one of them stops after a minute. Then you try to corral them all to go, and three of them start again.
And one of them never really got going, but you let him keep his oar in the water dragging the whole boat.
You’ll never make it.
*FOURTH*
Course correct as you go.
If you just point your rowing boat from one side of the river to your goal on the other, and never adjust for the tide, or oncoming party-boats, you won’t get to where you wanted to go. Your leadership team needs a mechanism to see the effect of its actions, and to adjust in an aligned and responsive way to get there.
How we can support you
- Join us on a workshop on how to scale your company; create time to focus on the bigger picture; and keep values and purpose core to your company. For max 5 CEOs of companies with revenues between £1.5m and £15m.
- Subscribe to our Bite-Sized Business Tips - thought snippets for values-centred business leaders. Every few days, a short focussed read on a specific topic of how to lead a company that values both profit and purpose.
- Talk to us to explore how we can help you scale your company in the direction you want to take it.