You built your business up; are you at risk of bringing it down?
You built your business up; are you at risk of bringing it down?
Confession-time: I am a perfectionist. Not in the cute way we all claim in interviews, but in a deep-rooted way that often narrows my perspective and limits my ability to look at situations optimally.
This condition made me a good writer. It drove me to work hard at developing my skills – quickly embracing new mediums, new formats, and new subject areas – and boosted my confidence in my ability to build a successful practice.
My desire to perfect outcomes enabled me to recognize talent and assemble teams. It drove me to set-up systems and processes that give my clients confidence that I will exceed expectations.
But when it comes to the day-to-day running of our businesses, my perfectionism has been my Achilles heel. Even though I have a talented team of people surrounding me, I struggle with delegation because I’m convinced I can execute tasks faster than I can explain how to do them. It isn’t because I think I’m better than others at conducting these tasks – it’s because I don’t have time to formulate my thoughts and express them in a form that’s, well, perfect.
And like many of you, I needed to wear many different hats in the early days of growing the business. So it got to the point where there were way too many things living inside my head.
Part of this is personality. But this challenge is accentuated because I was educated to be a journalist and trained to be a creative writer and director – not to be a manager and not to be a leader. Most entrepreneurs and team leaders aren’t prepared for these roles. Many of us were promoted and encouraged to start our own gigs because we were good at what we do – not because of our managerial talents.
I encounter many great brands that have been built on instinct and managed on intuition. But that’s not sustainable because owning all aspects of your brand story makes you, to borrow a developer’s term, your firm’s single-point-of-failure (SPF).
Knowing whether you’re an SPF is to think of your role as you would a product. If there is no redundancy to what you do, then that’s a single point of failure. If you’re the only one who can close a deal, or manage a client, or knows your company passwords – you’re an SPF. And you risk bringing it down.
That’s why I’ve spent the last few years learning to let go, and have found many concepts and frameworks to help shift my mindset. Our Sweetspot exercise and Self-Valuator has helped me recognize what activities deliver the most value to the business. Building out our Delegate to Elevate workshop has helped me view delegation as enabling others, versus hading off chores.
But there’s one practical tool that’s done the most in reducing the risk of me being our firm’s SPF, and that’s having a branded WIKI.
Developing our brand WIKI for Parcel was a monumental task in downloading our processes and policies so that everyone in the company had access to what has, in large part, lived inside my head for years. And although I miss the days having people come to me for our Mailchimp password and… yeah, right, of course, I don’t miss those days.
But beyond having a repository for passwords and contact info, the WIKI has been instrumental in helping our team feel more confident in how to live our brand. One of our brand values is to “decomplexify” things like process and communications. So our WIKI includes tips for doing just that at all touchpoints and for all roles.
Two insights were vital in making this download and documentation manageable. One was that we have brand values that are very much like behaviour codes, which makes integrating our values into our processes far easier.
The second was to recognize that perfect is the enemy of done. And that even if we could capture 80% of the steps, it would be better than gathering none. And because, once it’s built, the WIKI format is easily updatable by anyone on the team regardless of technical skill, it truly is a living document that will, frankly, never be done.
It may be comforting to know where everything in your business is at any given time – but I must admit, it’s way more liberating when you know you’re not the only one. So as you look to future-proof your business, think like a product developer and look at ways to build redundancy. But be sure to start with yourself.