The Layers Of Complexity

Working with different Business Leaders and Company owners everyday means I hear about their challenges and frustrations. One common theme is the growing layers of complexity they face each day in their business. There are a number of contributing the factors to this. Firstly the complexity (red tape) that large company's seem to drown their team leaders in. Complying with the requirements of the parent organisation can actually dictate much of the days work and hugely reduce productivity. Who reads these reports? Why is the ability to make decisions not pushed down to the managers on the job so they can be made and dealt with?

Complexity caused by growth is also a common issue. All businesses experience added complexity as they add client numbers, staff numbers, different products or enter new markets. The challenge is to get these company's focused, efficient and their leaders free from daily clutter so they can work on their businesses. It is the evolution of all organisations that as they grow and evolve so too does complexity and this requires new systems and an awareness of the likely problems that will present and tools to overcome them.

Whilst solutions to these issues are also varied the main focus should be on ensuring leaders int he organisation have the delegation and authority to make decisions as they need to rather than having to create a bottleneck by having to push them up the chain. Having simple team KPI's, measuring the numbers that are important to the lifeblood of the business and focusing the whole team onto some simple relevant quarterly goals is essential.

Of course the fact a business is growing in itself is good news.....making it fly is just gold!!

Karl

Checking in With Reality

As we work one on one with business owners to grow their businesses we get to see their many and varied challenges. One learning that we have as a team in our own business is to constantly check our systems against reality. It is very easy to add more complexity to a company when what is really needed is a simple tweak to the current process to get better results or information. New systems for the sake of them do not save time. Checking reality with the desired outcome is all that is required to see is a system is performing.

Each business we work with has a different structure, industry, market and their own unique financial and management challenges and whilst there are similarities in the evolution of each business a universal approach to growth does not work. Likewise the owner operator has differing needs than a larger company with a management team. One common theme is that all business owners experience the isolation of leading. Sometimes the network we provide by getting our clients together regularly or by simply listening to their issues, gives that sounding board they need to re energise and overcome the latest challenge.

Karl (hit our website)