Founders Must Balance Objectives and Resources

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Before you blame your team for your business’s slow execution, revisit your strategic mapping

It takes balance to grow a great change-the-world business. And here's the problem, I'm coaching a founder right now who's got, let's just say, 15 team members, and he has very high frustration that they're not “executing well.” The first thing I asked him was whether their goals and KPIs were clearly presented to his team. (I’ve learned never to take this critical step for granted!) 

He replied they had set clear objectives but had failed to deliver on a single KPI. This led me to ask my second question: do you have the right team in place to execute on your strategy and objectives? This can be a deceptively hard question for some founders to answer. After all, they hired their team and do not like to contemplate the prospect of having messed up.

If the answer had been “no,” I would have suggested that he adjust his plan – including his objectives and KPIs – to meet the resources he had. If he replied “yes,” I would have suggested that perhaps he was biting off more than he could chew or had too much on his plate. Pick your metaphor: the point is that whether the founder says “no” or “yes,” it seemed clear that his strategy was out of balance with his resources and that rebalancing was in order.

When your strategy and goals are in balance with your time, talent and money, your business should be able to operate like a game of dominos. The dominoes are like priorities: you line them up and push them down one at a time. You finish your first priority and this triggers your second priority and so forth. On the other hand, when strategy and resources are unbalanced, the dominoes aren’t arranged in this way. Instead, they are simply piled on top of each other; everything is a priority, which means nothing is a priority.

Don’t blame your team

I strongly encourage the founders with whom I work to resist the all too natural urge to blame their teams for not executing and, instead, take on 100 percent responsibility for bringing your objectives into alignment with your resources. 

And the best way I know of to do this is to return to your strategic mapping and reacquaint yourself with these seven questions:

1. What’s our vision?

2. What do our customers want?

3. What’s happening around us in our marketplace? Key trends?

4. What is the bigger purpose our company is here to accomplish?

5. What do we do - in simple, clear terms?

6. What are our core values?

7. What’s most important, right now?

Reviewing your strategy will give you a fresh appreciation of the context in which you are competing and furnish the important data you need to answer the all-important question #7. The KPIs that come out of question #7 can now be strictly prioritized as you set up your first domino, second domino and so forth. Now, match up your top objectives to your resources (internal and external - time, money, people) and make sure that you are balanced. Only bite off what your resources can chew and fully digest. 

Once you’ve done this, you will be able to say with some certainty, for example, “I can put sales on objective #1 and operations on objective #2, but I don’t believe we have the resources to tackle objective #3 at this time. Let’s put it on hold until our next retreat, which is only 90-100 days away.”

By making it clear that if we can only work on one thing, it is this one thing, and that if, and only if, we have time, this is the second thing we will work on, you will build an atmosphere of successful execution. Your employees will enjoy clarity, which means they will feel safe, which further means that they will be more relaxed and confident of going faster and working with greater efficiency. Before too long, your team will be able to handle more dominoes and expansion will support getting more done. 

But if you push to get more done before your resources are ready, you will likely tip that tower of dominoes over and it will come crashing down. 

To reiterate just a bit: committing to this kind of total ownership for your success takes practice, but it will ultimately save you time and expense, not to mention gray hairs, when compared with defaulting to blame. This is not to say that founders are always wrong about the efforts put out by their team! Evaluating performance is an important part of any leadership skill set and it, too, takes time to develop. But the chances are pretty good that you did make the right hires and that balance is what you’re running up against.

And balance is a different animal than performance. Understanding balance is a strategic mindset, the kind required of successful startup founders. And that's why we do a strategic (re)evaluation and check-up every 90 days with the founders whom we serve. Make balance the foundation for all the successful, day-to-day problem solving you do. 

Sincerely,

Rob Craven, scalepassion

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All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!