Stop Your Meddling!

In this seventh article, we will examine the sixth in a series of 10 key challenges to growth and how successful owner-managers may overcome them.

Last time, we discussed the importance of maturing as an organization and the stages of development it passes through. This time, we will explore the behavior of the boss and how it impacts the practice. These two topics are closely related.

Most businesses begin as what we term artisans (eg, plumbers who plumb, accountants who perform accounting). This business type spends most of its time practicing their profession/trade or delivering the service they offer. This is certainly true of health care professionals.

Over time—as the business grows—the founder inevitably spends more time on routine management tasks (eg, invoicing, collecting money, designing processes, upgrading systems). Whether they like it or not, he/she is cast into the role of hero. Much of their time is spent either fighting fires or solving problems brought to them by members of staff. This is a perfectly natural progression. After all, the boss and founder is the person with the key relationships and engrained understanding of the business. We have observed that, for many people, being a hero becomes addictive. People derive satisfaction from solving short-term issues, and at 6 o'clock, they feel that they have indeed done a day's work.

This style of management brings with it two problems, however. (1) The more you solve problems for others, the more problems they will bring for you to solve. Heroes find themselves working later at the office. (2) Although fighting fires may seem like a productive use of time, it is unlikely to grow the business.

At some point, most heroes realize this cannot go on, and so they recruit other managers to share the burden. The challenge now faced by the owner-manager is that of letting go—and most of them cannot. The owner-manager cannot stop from interfering in the jobs they have recruited others to do, because as the boss, they know how to do the jobs better than anyone else. In our terminology, they cease to be a hero and become a meddler.

It is not hard to predict what happens next, if the tendency to meddle goes unchecked: Either the demoralized staff will quit, or the owner-manager concludes that he/she is paying people to do the work that they can do, and consequently the management team is fired. The owner-manager then reverts to being a full-time hero, until they again try to recruit help.

If this sounds too much of a parody, consider the evidence. Of the hundreds of owner-managers we meet at Cranfield's Business Growth and Development Programme, roughly 90% identify themselves as either predominantly heroes or meddlers. Only 5% rate themselves primarily as strategists (ie, leaders who work largely on the business, not in the business). And, it is only by working on the business that you will succeed in growing it.

Changing behavior is not easy, but it is possible. In the next article, we will look at what being a strategist entails, and how owner-managers who grow their businesses successfully make that transition.

For more information on BGP and Cranfield's other programs for owner-managers, visit www.som.cranfield.ac.uk/som/groups/enterprise/credo/index.asp.