One Leader is not enough

If you want to stay small and simple, one leader will do.  

But if you want to grow and scale or diversify, you’ll need more leaders.

The more leaders the better.

As a leader of leaders, I guide them, advise them, and steer their attention, but I let them lead.

How many leaders does your organization have?

Calculating average tenure

If you made a list of your employees (besides yourself as the founder) and wrote how many months or years each one has been with your organization, what is the average?  The average would be the total years and months divided by the number of employees.

What is the median?  The median is the length of time on the job in which there is the same number of people who have more than that as the number of people with less than that.

It’s interesting.  

I favor more time on the job where my employees get more experienced and require less training and make less mistakes.  Of course, it’s up to leaders and managers to keep it fresh, keep everyone learning, maintain high standards, and remove underperformers and replace them with better people.

What is the average tenure in your business?

Give the credit away, share the blame.

What would you think of a leader who took all the credit when things went right, and placed the blame on others when they went wrong?

Right…..so you don’t become that leader who is not respected and nobody wants to listen to anymore, you should do the opposite.

Give away the credit, and take the blame, or at least share it.

You can accomplish amazing things when you don’t care who gets the credit.

Is that you?

The most important appointment to schedule

I have a day scheduled in December – with myself.

That day I will review the past year and what I did and what worked and what didn’t – what I liked and didn’t.

I will review my business and how it’s going and how I feel about it and what it is doing to me – good or bad.

I will review what I want, and how I want the rest of my life to be.

I will plan the big things for next year and envision the next five years.

I will decide on changes in my life in the areas of health, family time and activities, and fun time with others, etc.

While it’s not the only time I think about these things, I will design my life the way I want it to be so it fills me with deep satisfaction and leaves little regret.

This is an important appointment.

I’ll be there – and I’ll be excited!

The Diamond Cutter

In my School of Entrepreneurship (thesoe.com) I have an exercise called The Diamond Cutter.  It’s about taking a business that is not making money, and making it profitable.

A Diamond Cutter gathers up the past, adds new thinking, and optimizes the business.

You have to understand what factors got the business here – what is good and what is not so good.

Then make intelligent decisions about what to do.

You look at people, your place, your product and market, your marketing, sales channels, production, and software, and all the KPIs.  To set things right you have to see things right.

By turning the right dials the right way in each function (department), you can find a way to optimize revenue and minimize expenses so that you can run the business on 80% – 90% of it’s revenue, and have a profit left over.

Do you need to do some Diamond Cutting?  Only the leader can initiate it.

Time and money

In the beginning, we use our time to get money. 

If we are successful. later, we can use our money to get time.

We can hire people to do things we used to do, to make more time for higher valued activities.

In the end, time is more valuable than money, but it takes perspective and maturity to realize it.

But more valuable than that, is your health, and a sense that you have used your talents to be the best person you can be.

Stop starting over

Each time you lose an employee you are starting over with that piece of the company.

If you have high employee turnover, you need to fix it, or you will never make progress.

With high turnover, you can’t get a good culture and self-sustaining organizational intelligence going.

You may not keep everyone forever, but you need to keep most good people a long time.

Why do good people leave?

Create quiet space

Everyone should create quiet space in their days for thinking – especially leaders.

We are awash in a tidal wave of inputs and distractions.  You can’t make good decisions or do good thinking in the constant noise.

In solitude, you can get centered, think about what is most important, ask and answer important questions thoughtfully, calm down and heal your spirit.

I work at home in the morning when nobody is there.  I go in the woods and work by myself for a while a lot of weekends.  Most importantly, I’m not a slave to my phone.

I’m calm, I don’t feel stressed, and I have perspective over my growing business.  I enjoy the journey.

Do make some time for solitude often enough?

How do you treat the "little guy"?

For some people, when they attain higher and higher levels of success, they start treating people badly.  They can be rude, bark at waiters, or start yelling at their people.  

You can tell a lot about more powerful people by the way they treat the less powerful.

You can also look at how they behave when nobody is watching.

Don’t be that guy who becomes a butthole that a lot of people don’t like just because you have a title or more money or you own stuff. 

Remember where you came from.  Have empathy.  You need all these people in your life, in and out of work.

If you chase them away, you are only hurting yourself.

Be nice to people on the way up, because if not, you will see them on the way down.

How do you FEEL in your business?

You are the leader.  You are creating this.

How do you feel in it and about it?

You are the Editor-in-Chief.

If you don’t like it, you can change it.