Manage and Direct

7th February 2017

While coaching one of my clients recently, I was reminded of the importance of managing your team, and not simply letting them get on with things. This particular client has done extremely well, and has moved things on significantly, in fact so much so that she now has a General Manager in place, and feels very strongly that the business can largely run without her. Getting to this stage is the aim of most business owners, but just because the business runs without them, doesn’t mean that they should take their hands off the steering wheel completely.

The thing is unless you have taken the view that you really want nothing to do with the business at all, it is essential that as Managing Director (which most business owners are) you must continue to do just that i.e. manage and direct.

In this particular instance there were already a few warning signals appearing, whereby despite there being clear actions for the General Manager to have carried out, none of them had been taken forward, and my suspicions were that this was because no-one was being held accountable.

When I asked the business owner if the actions had been completed she was unsure whether they had been or not, and in the end I had to ask the question of others to see what had and had not been done.

Providing the owner changes their ways and starts to hold regular meetings checking what has been completed in terms of actions agreed, then no harm will be done, and they will move forward efficiently, and at the pace set by the owner. However, if this situation is allowed to continue so that it becomes the norm, standards could quickly start to slip, sales targets could be missed, and it will be harder to get control back in place.

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