Today I want to talk about three things you can be doing to develop a leadership team in your business. I’m the owner of WinRate Consulting and host of the Big Stud Podcast, but developing leadership within your organization is the only way you get out and actually get to enjoy your time, enjoy the money, and feel like you’re not stuck in place. I was talking to a client today actually about how he felt like he was in quicksand because these little tasks kept pulling him back in. He wasn’t able to get out and become the visionary and start to lead his company. He was too busy as chief technician. He was getting pulled into all the little monotonous details.
And so to do that, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen where you’re able to let go of the day-to-day and start to develop strategies where you have other people on your team who are leaders in place and ultimately leaders in charge. I don’t want to say there’s not a silver bullet for this. I think every environment’s a little different, every person’s a little different. I think developing leadership is not a standard protocol. I believe there are some nuances to it, depending on variables. But there are three things I think that are absolutely imperative in order for you to not just start to build, but maintain a quality leadership team. The first, and I don’t think this is going to be a shock to anybody, but clear job description, roles, and responsibilities.
What I see what happens a lot when people start developing leadership teams is there’s no clear lane to say, “What are you in charge of or not?” And people are in and out of their lanes, which creates complexity and it creates lack of confidence and it creates lack of clarity on what is my job and not. And then people start stepping on each other’s toes and like, “Oh, I thought you had it this week. Well, you had it last week.” And it becomes really convoluted. So when you put a leader in place, it’s very important they have a clear understanding of their job description, roles, and responsibilities, so that they know what they are in charge of. And if you don’t do that, it’s going to be convoluted, you’re going to be stepping in each other’s toes. It’s not going to be fun. Everybody who’s done that knows exactly what I’m talking about and would probably agree with me that it’s a terrible way to do it.
So job description, role, responsibilities, first step. If you cannot tell me what someone’s job description is, what role they play and what their responsibilities are, you are not in a position to even hire a leader because you don’t actually know what you’re hiring for. You’ll say, “Oh, man. I just need help, man. I just need someone to take some of this shit off my plate, man. Come on. Come on, Mike. Come on, Ron. Dude, you look cool, man. We drink beer together. Let’s go. You can be a leader on my team.” That’s not how it works. Never worked that way. So that first part, job description, roles, responsibility. Second, once you have those responsibilities outlined, you should shoot to have every single responsibility listed has a clear, measurable, and trackable metric that judges the success of that responsibility.
It could be days on site, a number of proposals sent. It could be AR/AP reporting. It can be convoluted to answer that question and complex. But every responsibility should have a metric. Because if you don’t do that, you’re going to run the risk of saying, “Well, it seems like you’re doing a good job, or it seems like you’re falling short.” And then your leadership style becomes very opinionated. And when it’s opinionated, trust me, it becomes confrontational. Because the minute you have an opinion about somebody else, they’re going to try to defend themselves. They’re going to push back. They’re going to try to prove you wrong. The metrics should tell whether or not that person’s right or wrong. Go back and check out my video on core values about how to use it as a management leadership tool.
But specifically in this scenario, having clear metrics for each responsibility will allow you to lead that person more effectively because it takes the emotion out of the leadership. Now it’s an objective measurement tool that says, “Hey, you are or not performing.” Especially early on in business, you tend to hire your friends as leaders because you know and trust each other. And then it becomes harder to hold them accountable or even harder to fire them because it becomes very opinionated whether or not they are doing their jobs or not. So having an objective measurement tool, such as a key performance indicator dashboard, KPI dashboard, or it’s just in general specific metrics that judge the responsibilities and how well they’re effectively executing on them. Third, we call it a continual evolution strategy, CES.
I don’t know, we use three letter words for everything. But a continual evolution strategy, what that looks like is on a quarterly basis, analyzing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, aka SWOT analysis of each key leader, and then creating a 90-day initiative plan to take advantage of their strengths, improve their weaknesses, go out after some opportunities and protect themselves against some threats. I just went through this process with my team. We did it as a company, and I did it with individual leaders on my team as well. This allows you to continually evolve those people. Because if you’re not pouring into them, a lot of times they just become stagnant, they become complacent, or they stop evolving as the business evolves. I’m sure everybody’s had an experience where one of their leaders used to be great and now sucks.
Well, what happened is the business evolved and got more complex, more challenging, but the asset didn’t. The human asset did not evolve. They’re the same they were a year ago. And they were probably perfect a year ago where you were. But because you stopped pouring into them and evolving them, the business outpaced them. And so now we’ll say, “What got you here is not going to get you there.” There’s some truth to that. But there’s also some you didn’t fucking bring them with you. There’s also some you left them behind because you got so busy doing your job, you stopped pouring into your team. So continual training, continual evolution strategies developed around understanding their SWOT analysis and creating initiatives, so that they can evolve with you as a company and not get left behind. Recap, three things you need to do to start developing leaders on your team.
First – job description, roles, responsibilities. Second – metrics that measure the success of each of those responsibilities. Third – have a continual evolution strategy in place, so that you’re pouring into your leaders every 90 days, so that they can keep up with the pace the company is growing at. That’s a great way for you to create long-term success that gets you out of the business and stops you from having to spend so much time in the weeds, in that quicksand feeling like you just can’t get out. If you have questions on that, feel free to reach out.
Check out winrateconsulting.com if you have more questions about how to bring a coach into your ecosystem. We’ve just built a whole new frequently asked question page, and we have some client success stories on the website now as well. So I’d love to hear from you, love to help you, love to connect you with one of the coaches on the team, whatever that might look like. But for now, take that advice, go start developing a leader, so you can stop being the chief technician within your company. So ultimately, you can win fast and win often.
