Most of the entrepreneurs who have a growing business tend to feel forced to take control when things change. But, there’s a difference between being a good leader and a control freak, and the latter only does harm to the business and your team. So, what is it that you need to do to take control of things without hampering your work processes and the business as a whole?
Don’t Be Your Own Obstacle
One of the core values of entrepreneurship is to help everyone around you grow. Yet, most of them get stuck with managing the business and end up standing in the way of the skilled people they hired to get the job done.
So, here are the five rules that you can follow to put the above advices in action as a business owner.
- Don’t Try To Fix Everything At The Same Time
As a business founder or a leader in your industry, you’re likely to have a great deal of conundrums surrounding you; this can distract the team and prevent them from focusing on what really is important.
Remember a conundrum only turns into a problem if you let it. You should not try to fix everything at once, rather fix one issue at a time.
- Know What Is Urgent and What Is Important
When you become overwhelmed with things to do: prioritise. Focus on that one important thing and deploy the team around it. This will provide clarity and eliminate confusion.
It seems obvious to focus on what is simply right in front of you; those tasks that require your urgent and immediate attention.
On the flip side though, important things may not always be right in front of you.
If you keep focusing on the urgent, you will not have enough time to address those important things slipping through the cracks. So, it is recommended that you start working on tasks that are urgent as well as important, delegate the ones that are urgent but unimportant, and plan time to work on the important but not so urgent tasks.
- Don’t Try Fixing Everything Yourself
Take your time to make it clear why problems must be fixed and delegate someone else to fix them. You should not be doing everything by yourself as you have hired capable people to tackle such challenges.
In addition, your team becomes better and more capable when you’re not the only one solving problems. You can hamper team relationships when you try to solve problems for them as it sends a negative message that you don’t trust your team enough to get the job done.
Just remember: being a success comes through not only leadership, but also the ability to realise when someone is in a position to do a better job than you.
- Focus on The Outcome, Not Methodology
Once, you empower someone to get jobs done, do not micromanage how they do it. You should be focusing on the results and not methodology. People coming from different backgrounds approach problems in different ways; this is the beauty of working with each other.
Clearly communicate what you want and get out of the way. A team member can solve problems in a new way and you may come to see that their approach was more effective than yours.
- Be A Pre-Planner
The Phrase “By failing to plan, you are planning to fail” is true when it comes to being in control of your business. Having a plan to tackle any unforeseen problems requires a couple of basic but vital business management entities.
The first is a team that has the problem-solving skills and the other is the business funds. Whenever any problem occurs, an experienced and capable team can solve the problem and most issues can be solved with the presence of emergency funds in place. There are a number of things that you can do to make your team better at problem-solving which includes taking mock-drills over the potential problems that can occur.
You can even build emergency funds to be used to stabilise the financial instability that may occur. Opt for financial products such as invoice finance, cash flow finance and asset finances provided by an alternate business funds provider to build an emergency fund for your business. These products provide more flexibility in pay-backs and have less interest on them compared to bank-loans. Pre-planning is always better than post-planning and it is also one of the things that separate the successful entrepreneurs from others.
Final Thoughts
Be patient with yourself. Success is a slow process, and things are not always clear. Be compassionate with your team and implement above –mentioned tips. These will put you in a position to control things in a better way enabling you to keep moving forward.
