The key to leadership at scale is relying on systems rather than individual heroics.
getty
Like many founders, I relied on stamina rather than leadership structure to run my business. The harder I worked the better my law firm did. Every aspect of the firm’s success depended on my direct involvement. I was the hero in this journey and I relished the role, at least for a while.
As the firm grew, I found myself stretched thinner and thinner. I started to notice cracks in the foundation I had worked so hard to build. Turns out that running a business on the hero model is incompatible with long-term growth.
That’s when it hit me. If I was going to scale my business, I needed to build leadership at scale. And that would require new habits. But where to begin? How does an owner transition from being in total control to establishing a leadership structure that engenders trust?
Testing the Leadership Structure Waters
I needed a reality test: which tasks did I actually need to do myself, and which could be delegated? I spent a lot of time figuring that out, and in my book, Built to Run: Designing a Business That Thrives Without You, I distill that trial and error into four simple exercises. If you’re struggling to draw that line, give them a try.
- The daily handoff. Choose one recurring daily task you’re used to doing on your own and hand it off to someone else. You can give detailed instructions, but no checking up on how it’s going. At the end of the day, assess what went right and what needs fixing.
- The “Why am I doing this” audit. For one week, every time you begin a new task, write it down. At the end of the week, review your list and ask yourself why you think you need to do each task. If the answer is because you’re the fastest, or because it’s expected, or because you don’t trust anyone else to do it, circle that task. Then find someone to take over one of those tasks each week.
- The 10-minute debrief. At the end of each day, take 10 minutes to make two short lists. The first lists the tasks you had to repeat unnecessarily, and the second lists the tasks someone else could have done if you had given complete instructions. The intelligence you glean will not only save you time and increase overall efficiencies in your company, but it will comprise the first draft of your operations manual.
- The “silent Saturday” test. Pick a Saturday and remove yourself completely from all company communications. Believe me, if there’s an emergency your team will track you down. Log back in Monday morning and see what happened. If a problem surfaced, you’ve isolated a design opportunity. For all that went well without you, you’ve got proof that your systems hold.
These exercises reveal where you can begin the work of designing a leadership structure that relies on systems rather than heroics. And that’s the key to leadership at scale.
Leave a comment