Business tips: Loosen the reins

It is hard to admit, but the employees you typically hire are not as good as you. It’s not enough just to be the boss and the owner. You need to know more than anyone else about everything so you can have daily control. This applies to your industry, customers, vendors, and all the inner workings of the business. As a result, you only hire weaker “B” players who will be happy to work in supporting roles. Predictably, your “B” employees do a poor job by hiring “C” players who mimic your hiring pattern. You continue to wonder why your organization starts to crumble from the top down. You have failed to achieve exactly what you need to grow a business: leverage. You are unable to use other people’s skills since they are so weak. You remain “all powerful” while the company remains unable to grow.

As a result, you continue to use a hub-and-spoke organization where all important decisions must come through you. While the official organization chart is hierarchical, the only real power center is you. This is demonstrated by your employees constantly asking your opinion on even the most fundamental business issues. They look to you in all decisions so they do not have to take responsibility. By making decisions for them, they don’t have to make their own since they know you will jump in and do their job. This keeps you incredibly busy, with little time to accomplish your own tasks.
 

Change the math. As an “A” type of player, when you hire only “B” players, the math is not in your favor. This creates a company that gets weaker as it moves down the organization chart and away from you. If an “A” player is 90 percent effective, and a “B” player is 70 percent effective, and both are involved in decision-making, the result will be 63 percent successful. Add the “C” player into the mix, who is 50 percent effective, and the result will be 32 percent success rate. Alternately, if three “A” players work together, they will be 73 percent successful.

Hire employees better than you. The best situation is to get team members who have complementary skills in areas where you are weak or disinterested. For example, if you love doing landscaping at customer locations, find someone who can do all the office management. You need to find joy (and relief) that there are people in your company who can do a job better than you. Remember, this is what you are paying for as an employer. It is a tough realization for any small business owner when they discover they can no longer do every job. Get people who will challenge your point of view, if that’s what it takes, to find an ideal business solution. Until you hire people better than you, the company will never have the ideas and energy (i.e., leverage) to grow.

Let other people be the hub. Implement a hierarchical decision-making process so actions can move forward without you. Your ability to get things done in a larger organization relies on hiring managers who are more skilled than you. As a business owner, this is the only way to get the leverage you need to succeed. Letting go of total control is probably one of the most difficult transitions a business founder needs to make. When a company starts out, the organization looks like this — just one dot, the founder. As the company grows, the hub-and-spoke organization becomes a series of dots all clustered around and reporting to the founder. True successful leverage and growth in an organization happens when the founder trusts other managers in the company. You can’t be everywhere, and unless you hire strong “A” players, success will not follow.

Practice it in two steps. From total control to no-control can send panic through even the best owner. Instead, use a two-step process to start giving one strategic task to your best person to complete. Help set the goal, how it will be achieved, what success will look like and its due date for completion. Monitor the ongoing results. When this is successful, delegate more tasks to the same person, but this time have them determine how it will be achieved. As things progress, include other employees in a similar two-step process.

Barry Moltz helps get small businesses unstuck. His new book, “How to Get Unstuck: 25 Ways to Get Your Business Growing Again” is now available.