"Mr Fix It"

Being a business owner, or running a group of people who are trying to get a job done, can feel a lot like being “Mr. (or Ms.) Fix It”.  Problems come to you.  It’s your team delegating things up to you – the things that aren’t going well.

But if you get all the problems, maybe you haven’t trained your team well.  Maybe you have not empowered them enough to think on their own, given the goals and values of the organization (surely they know them, right?).  Maybe you have made them dependent on you as the one who will save them.  Maybe you have made yourself the central communication switch for bad news.  In doing so, your team doesn’t think about preventing problems so much, because they don’t have to deal with them anyway; you do.

Don’t be upset.  You did this.  The good news is, you can change it.

Right?

Get a Defensive Coordinator

Most entrepreneurs are good at offense – Sales and Marketing.  But to be successful you need a defense too – Accounting and Operations.  

Charge your accounting manager with being your indespensible and active assistant in ensuring your company does not spend too much in its operations.  

More eyes, more questions, more suggestions.

Learn from the struggle

Difficulties come not to obstruct, but to instruct.

Pay attention to the feedback, and learn quick.

Task Completion

All great achievments are made up of hundreds if not thousands of individual tasks.  The result of each task is built atop another.

Do you complete tasks?

How to be successful

1) Get started.

2) Keep going.

It may not be quite that simple, but not doing one of these is the major problem for most people.

You?

Diversification or Diversion

If you added a product or service and it is more different from your original product or service than it is the same, it is a diversion.  If it uses the same salespeople, employee skills, marketing, and equipment, than it may be a diversification.

Diversification like this is often good.  Diversions leave you owning two businesses under the same roof and make things complicated.  They may be good, but not if you don’t do well in either business.

Consider carefully.

What should you be doing?

As a leader, do you know what you should be doing?  It sounds like a nutty question, but there is nobody around telling the guy or gal at the top what he/she ought to do.  So we do what we think we ought to be doing – we make it up.

That’s why even great leaders need coaches and training.  We aren’t born knowing what to do.  The last thing we want to do is spend years thinking about it the wrong way and doing the wrong thing, thinking it was the right thing.

Daily goal setter and daily goal hitter

While we have long term goals and dreams, whether they come true or not depends on what we are doing today.  Results come from action, and action cannot be taken in the furture – only today.

Each night or very early in the morning, ask yourself “What is MOST important for me to get done to make the results I seek happen?”  Then plan your day accordingly.  Focus and work on the highest value activities based on your long and mid range goals.  

Just as your life is made up of a continuous series of days (and “nows”), so your goal achieving journey is made of of days too.  Plan each day well, and stay focused on that plan all day.

Passion and Commitment

Being human, your passion will rise and fall by the day and week and month, but as a leader you must demonstrate to your team that your commitment never wanes.

Do you show your commitment on a consistent basis?

Multi-tasking is only for unimportant things

You can do two things at once, but you can’t focus on two things at once.  You can multi-task but you can’t multi-focus.

When you have too much to do for the time you have, ask “What is the MOST important and valuable thing to do now?”, and focus on that one thing.