The world is changing and getting more complex at an accelerating rate. As a result, it’s highly unlikely that one person at the top has the skill or the time to handle all the required senior leadership and management responsibilities—even in a small company.

In his book The Ideal Executive: Why You Can’t Be One and What To Do About It, Ichak Adizes addresses everything a corporate leader today is theoretically supposed to be able to do.

"According to the classic management textbooks and best-selling guides, the ideal manager is knowledgeable, achievement-oriented, detail-oriented, systematic, and efficiency-oriented; organized, a logical and linear thinker; charismatic, visionary, a risk-taker, and change oriented; and sensitive to people and their needs."

As Adizes goes on to point out, no one person has the skill or the time to do all those things equally well.  We all have strengths and weaknesses. And, if you do try to bear the full brunt of leadership/management responsibility on your own, the resulting stress can be unbearable.

Even startups benefit from a co-founder with complimentary skill approach. Think of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, or Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The JP industry has had its share of successful two person led companies—sometimes even a husband/wife combination, where the one might be an engineer, for example, and another the marketing specialist. 

As a company grows, the leadership team necessarily expands. As Adizes points out though, sustaining the effectiveness of a diverse team of people is not easy. While at its best, blending differing skills and perspectives leads to better decisions, it can also lead to conflict. So how do you best make leadership/management into a productive team effort?

1. Accept the reality that change is part of life.

Never think that all you have to do is create a well-designed business system and maintain it. Whatever system you build will at some point be obsolete. Whatever you think is going to happen in the marketplace in the future won’t pan out completely as expected. People on your staff who are the right person in the job now will not be the right person at some point down the road. You never get to a point where things stay “all good” for very long. Try not to get frustrated and discouraged. Accept this as inevitable and recognize you will have to make sure your company keeps evolving to cope with change.

2. Realize that change inevitably brings both problems and opportunities.
As your company grows and as the world around you changes, systems, beliefs, and expectations in place are no longer valid. Things that used to work don’t anymore. At the same time new opportunities appear from nowhere. For example, the internet made it easier for companies to communicate with consumers, but it also changed how consumers exchange information, good or bad, about products and companies. And with the pace of change accelerating, you need even more skill and speed of response to make necessary changes in a timely manner to fix problems and capitalize on opportunities.  

3. Cover all the leadership/management bases.
Acknowledge that you can’t do it all. Because of the demands, it’s going to take multiple people with different skills, working styles, mindsets, and interests working well together. No matter how small or big your company, all the management tasks need to be handled by somebody. You can’t leave any gaps. In my Evolutionary Success™ program, I detail six necessary ongoing leadership/management functions:
a. Defining the company’s purpose
b. Discovering current reality
c. Dreaming what things could be like in the future
d. Developing improvements to the business system
e. Deploying the improvements
f.  Directing the business system from day to day

Make it as clear as you can—in writing—what each member of the management team is responsible for. Some responsibilities will be shared but one person should always have the lead role. You’ll also need a mechanism to establish and follow up on performance objectives for each team member, including yourself, preferably by quarter.

4. Understand your own weaknesses.
Decide which of these leadership/management functions you like and can do well and what needs to be ceded to others. Then make sure you have the right people on your team to cede things to.

5. Agree on a shared purpose
In any kind of team activity, it is absolutely critical for all the players to share a common purpose—preferably in writing. By purpose, I mean the answers to these questions:
a. Who’s the customer?
b. How will we improve their lives (products/services)?
c. What will be our competitive advantage?
d. What’s our long-term vision of success?

6. Create a culture of mutual trust and respect.
Adizes talks about the difference between constructive and destructive conflict among members of a diverse team. Constructive conflict produces optimum decision-making because it promotes healthy exploration of all alternatives. Destructive conflict leads to team disintegration. The key to avoiding destructive conflict is to create and preserve a culture of mutual trust and respect (we certainly could use more of that in the world today.). 

7. Make every team member feel like an owner.
If you want your fellow leadership/management team members to be as motivated and dedicated as you, there needs to be a payoff for their hard work and not just a lot of “attaboys” or “attagirls.” Since profitability is the ultimate measure of a business’s performance, some significant portion of all team members’ compensation should be profit-related.

Next Steps

Review the list of leadership/management functions in #3 above. Are all the functions being handled well? If so, great! If not, review the other suggestions in this post to see what might be the cure. Even if everything’s fine now, if you’re doing it all yourself, do you need to start considering delegating some of the leadership/management functions to someone else? As always, I’m here to help you if you need someone to bounce things off of or could use some encouragement. Contact Kyle Schaller (kschaller@jpma.org) to set up an appointment.