You Are the Reason, Entrepreneur
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash
Face it founders and entrepreneurs, you are the reason your employees aren’t getting it.
I hear a lot of entrepreneurs complaining about the people around them, especially people on their team, but also key stakeholders such as marketing, sales or distribution partners. It seems these folks are always doing things wrong and never, ever listening!
And so I hear the old refrain: if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. And I’m here to tell you, entrepreneurs, that your lack of trust is not helping you or your company to grow up big and strong.
I think the problem stems from a well-known psychological effect called the fundamental attribution error, which identifies the tendency for some people to overemphasize personality and underestimate situational explanations when describing someone else’s behavior. In the case of the entrepreneur, an example might be to ask a member of your team to do something, and when he or she fails to do it to your satisfaction, attribute it to a failure of effort, skill, or attitude rather than something else going on at the company.
I’m here to tell you that the “something going on” may very well be you. I do a lot of work with conscious leadership, and the number one commitment of conscious leadership is taking 100% responsibility for a situation. You can explore the concept further here, but asking yourself a few questions will help you develop that inward-looking muscle of responsibility.
Here are several examples:
Listen to the words you use in association with an employee that act as “triggers” for lack of 100% responsibility; words such as “should” and “shouldn’t” or “can” and “can’t.” Using these words, when aimed at someone else, implies that you may be committing the fundamental attribution error regarding this employee.
Ask whether you are providing enough clarity around corporate strategy. Do you have a playbook that details the fundamentals of your company, including why the company exists, what you do, how you behave, what’s most important right now, and so on. Without this valuable tool in place, your team cannot be expected to be effective over the long run.
Ask whether you’re providing clarity from an individual standpoint. At my former company, we designed a delegation tool that made it easy for the delegate to ask clarifying questions to the delegator (you) about scope, deadlines and the like. Assignments that are well-structured stand a better chance of being successful.
Finally, think hard about building in regular checkpoints that establish a rhythm of feedback and correction for you and your team. These may include quarterly town halls where you provide big picture updates, to monthly meetings where you dive deeper into your KPIs and other matters, and even to weekly voice memos to those who report to and/or are working on special projects for you.
Now, in those meetings, be obsessive about setting out priorities — one or two at most per meeting — and make sure you stick to your priorities and don’t get side-tracked. This will drive clarity as much as anything else you could possibly do.
In addition, ask yourself whether you have the right member of your team for a particular job. Different jobs or tasks not only require different skills but also different applications of what I think of as the leadership continuum. I’ve written on this here, but the leadership continuum argues that different people are more or less comfortable thinking tactically versus strategically over shorter or longer periods. As the leader, your job is to place people in the right place on the continuum.
The next time you feel your frustration rising over an employee’s performance, ask yourself:
Am I expecting too much of this person?
Am I expecting them to think like a manager when I hired them as a worker bee?
Am I expecting them to think strategically and longterm like a VP even though they have zero experience doing that kind of work?
If the answer is yes, then perhaps you haven’t done your job of putting people in the right roles? And rather than become exasperated with them and just doing it yourself, determine whether you can teach them a little something so he or she can do it next time. Think about reassigning the project/task to somebody else with the right kind of skill and experience.
But ultimately take 100% ownership of the problem, which doesn’t mean doing it yourself.
If you have children and have hired a babysitter, you might understand this analogy all too well. You arrive home to find out that the kids didn’t finish their homework or take a bath. Your first thought is that you told the sitter what you wanted her to do, so why didn’t she do it? Well, it turns out the kids tricked the sitter into letting them do part of their homework and skip the tub. “We had one yesterday!” they protested to her.
Armed with this knowledge, you can do one of two things: you can instruct the sitter about how to thwart the kids’ little stratagems or you can never go out again because no nanny can parent as well as you can! Now, the second option is not going to help your kids or your marriage any more than doing it all yourself is going to help your business.
As you grow your business, consider these ideas and feel free to tap into the tools provided in the related articles I’ve linked to. And do let me know what you’re doing to drive clarity and 100% responsibility in your change-the-world company.
Sincerely,
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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!