“Have you thought about appointing non-exec directors to support your strategy execution?”

“Nah, I don’t need that. I’m just a small business.”

Does that answer sound familiar?

I’ve heard entrepreneurs fob off their shortcomings too often with that type of sentiment. If that’s you, you have no right to complain that you’re struggling in your business.

It’s a popular myth in small business that, because it’s “only” a small business, everything can be done informally and supervised by the owner.

If you are the business, then the business has no value without you.

The more dependent the business is on you as the owner-manager, the less likely you’ll be able to sell it. Or if you don’t plan to exit, being indispensable might feed your ego, but it locks you into working long hours for too little pay.

Once you’ve grown beyond the start-up stage, your top priority is to get help. Not “help” as in employees or consultants, though that’s a logical starting point. I mean get yourself independent advisors who serve you either as your virtual board of directors, or appoint official, CIPC-registered non-executive directors.

We’ve run boardroom programmes for small groups of entrepreneurs since 2010 and acted as non-exec directors with many clients – compared with the solo, I’ll-do-it-my-way approach, we’ve seen first-hand how much more likely a business will achieve its growth targets when you have allies in your corner. Don’t be a martyr.

A popular belief is that growth must happen before hiring professional managers and forming a board of directors.

No! Growth is much more likely because you’ve first built your leadership team. For many of our clients wanting to scale, especially through acquisition growth, building their leadership team is invariably one of the top priorities we recommend.

A balanced board of directors is roughly one third to 50% home-grown talent, with the balance being non-exec experts with a solid industry track record.

Your board of directors is your sanity check, your accountability, even a shoulder to cry on. If you’re feeling stuck in your business, that’s the Peter Principle showing up. It’s a clear sign that growth is unlikely unless you grow your business’ leadership team beyond yourself.

If you want to build a business that has value, it’s time you got yourself out of the way – get help to grow.

Krulak’s Law of Leadership states that the future of an organisation is in the hands of the privates in the field, not the generals back home. To grow a business that can make a difference in the world and create ownership wealth for you, it’s imperative that you grow your people

Charles Krulak is a retired US Marine Corps general who, in a 1999 Marines Magazine article, coined the term “strategic corporal”. His article introduces the Three-Block War concept, where troops simultaneously engage in full-out battle, peacekeeping and humanitarian aid all within three city blocks.

Mission failure – and the death of your team and civilians – is almost guaranteed if decisions cannot be made in the moment at ground level. It’s near-impossible to write policies and train unit leaders for every possible situation that might arise. Instead, the corporals – the lowest-ranking leaders – must be able to think for themselves and immediately lead their teams to execute their decisions.

Increasingly, the world of work is pushing us into situations where it’s not possible to succeed if we must wait for an answer to, “What do I do next?” Agility depends on split-second decisions to exploit time-critical information, and this could have a major impact on your company’s reputation, good or bad.

As the general of your business, you’ve invested your sweat and money in building your business and looking after hard-earned, loyal clients. That could all be decimated in seconds by a junior employee whose public relations blunder is videoed and plastered all over social media. Not only is this an entrepreneur’s nightmare, we see major brands hurt by this almost every week.

Or the right decision by an employee to solve a problem for a delighted customer could be worth thousands in the PR and brand-awareness effect. That worker has  a multiplier effect where their value far exceeds their salary.

In other words, as a high-level leader, it’s your job to empower your front-line leaders to make independent and high-impact decisions.

But how do you do this? Krulak offers 5 principles:

Offer them the freedom to fail and with it, the opportunity to succeed.

Micro-management must become a thing of the past.

Supervision must be complemented by proactive mentoring.

Empower them, hold them strictly accountable for their actions.

Allow the leadership potential within each of them to flourish.

(Brand Minds)

“Leaders are judged, ultimately, by the quality of the leadership reflected in their subordinates.” — Krulak.

Are you employing biological robots, or are you leading leaders?

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(Image credit: UN News Women in Peacekeeping https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/04/1036511)

Gemba is "the actual place", where the work happens. A gemba walk can not only save costs, but improve learning and relationships. Here’s how it works…

If you’ve heard of “kaizen” – continual, iterative improvement through small changes – you’ll easily see how gemba fits in.

Pronounced gem-ba, gemba is more formally defined as “genchi genbutsu”. If you think that sounds Japanese, you’re right! It roughly means, “Go see for yourself to understand.”

In business, gemba is where value is created. For a retail shop, it’s at the shopping aisles and tills; for an actor, it’s on stage; for a farmer, it’s where stuff grows. It’s listening to a call centre agent helping a customer. If you think this is just like the 1970s fad of management by walking around (MBWA), then you’re right again. Sort of.

The overlap between gemba and MBWA is that both eliminate the problems of being a “paper” manager, the risk of managing your project or business through reports and second-hand information. There’s no better way to get in touch with reality than a gemba walk.

Gemba walks with my clients help me quickly see how their business really works. (And sometimes how it doesn’t work, or else why would a management consultant visit, right?) I can take in the actual production line, the smells and sounds, and actually feel the intangible culture. So much more than what financial statements and customer research could ever reveal.

But gemba builds on MBWA by applying some fundamental principles. For example, the main approach of gemba is to observe and learn – it’s not a debate or a witch-hunt. The focus is not the people, but the process. Hence, key values are respect, humility, truthfulness, and tenacity to question until we understand.

It helps to assume the person doing the work has the best knowledge and insights to solve problems. This might not hold true for very small businesses, where the owner-manager is likely to also be the technical expert.

Either way, gemba walks help push down decision-making and support agile process improvement in your business. Why not let your workers write the procedure manual? Resistance to change is minimised. Small changes emphasize common sense and low-cost instead of using big-change, method-oriented consultants.

The economic benefits are obvious: a lean, motivated and self-reliant team will surely perform better and create more owner wealth than a business that’s highly dependent on you.

But don’t do gemba just for the money! Even if there’s no financial pay-off, which is unlikely, gemba offers one of the best ways to strengthen collaborative relationships with your team. Observing and enquiring, as opposed to directing and giving orders, makes for a far more harmonious workplace, doesn’t it?

As much as gemba is good for lean production, kaizen, and efficient processes, it’s a key factor in engaging with people. Through gemba, we strengthen our human connections and, ultimately, we do work that makes a difference.

Because who wants to run a business just for the money?

If there’s one thing we’re learning from the coronavirus debacle, it’s that the slow-to-adapt are likely to perish. And fundamental to adapting to any situation is the ability to learn.

Whether it’s watching a few YouTube tutorials on how to video conference effectively – boy, have I seen some sad Zoom meetings! – or re-inventing your business to sell entirely new products to an entirely new audience, learning is the starting point.

This is not about the luck of a crisis boosting demand, or bad luck if you’re in a “wrong” industry. E-commerce companies are predisposed to thrive in a lockdown –illogical government limits aside – while most manufacturers, retailers and small businesses are suffering.

But unless your business really is at the extreme “unlucky” end of the continuum, there’s a lot you can do to avoid shutting down and maybe even limit downsizing.

Here are 4 principles we use that are not only good for long-term strategy, but can be applied tactically for quick solutions:

1. An intrinsic culture of learning and striving for self-mastery is paramount. This is integral to our philosophy at Growth Surge and how we choose our clients. Tolerate and even encourage acceptable mistakes and risk-taking. This shows up in agile principles of short development cycles, trial and error, and continual feedback. Review key events and decisions. Then make it explicit – see #2.

2. Systemise both individual and organisation learning. E.g. share personal on-the-job learning in master class-style forums. Keeping track of work and progress is a learning function e.g. a central dashboard of key goals for the week. Share and retain institutional knowledge through collaboration tools like Slack, MS Teams, and up-to-date job descriptions, policies and procedure for important processes.

3. Integrate learning into key functions and decisions. E.g. regularly survey customers after each major interaction to learn what worked and what needs fixing. With this, pivoting out of a crisis is more likely to succeed not only because of better market intel, but because you’re certain and confident.

4. Lastly – though there are many more points! – I’ve written about Learning To Learn (Feb. 2020) and I think this applies perfectly here. Budget the time and investment for at least 5 days every 3 months for continuing professional development. Lead by example: don't take a course and keep it secret. Apply point 2 e.g. talk about it, update your business systems.

If you’re trying to keep your business alive and survive the new normal, how is learning supporting this?

In coping with the social distancing response to the Coronavirus pandemic, getting your team out the office and working from home is the best thing we can do to help flatten the curve of infections (New York Times).

It’s easy to rush into hasty decisions – they’re so darn urgent! But as serious as Coronavirus is, it’s not a burning building. You can afford to take an hour or 5 to plan a strategic approach to having your team work from home. So here are 6 areas you need to get right to survive the switch both strategically and immediately. I’ve drawn from my decades of local and international work in virtual project teams as well as some interesting research to back up my anecdotes.

For the Coronavirus pandemic, the effects of social distancing will go far beyond the economic impact of lost revenue, low productivity, and defaulting debtors. Hardest hit will be companies and workers in in-person services or handling physical products – tourism, transport, factories, retail, maintenance, cleaning, and any secondary business supporting these. For these industries, the prognosis is ugly: remote work will be impossible to implement at scale. With little to counter the loss in revenue, reserves will be stretched to protect staff and idle production assets while you hunker through the storm.

Companies with a slightly easier ability to survive are those where remote work is possible in some way. But a good internet connection and the right software are merely 2 elements in a long list of requirements to survive an urgent shift to virtual work. Whether working from home has been a dream or you’ve already experimented with it, now is a good time to make it work for your whole business.

If you’re equivocating the merits of remote work and expecting massive productivity drops, think again. Although there are many pitfalls – a February 2020 Harvard article details some common challenges – many more studies across a variety of industries have shown that remote work generally has greater benefits than disadvantages. For example, Forbes reported in 2012 a study of a Chinese company randomly assigning workers to work from home. Not only did productivity shoot up 13%, but morale improved, sick leave dropped and staff turnover decreased.

As with any decision for a radical change, look beyond the tactical and operational knee-jerk reactions. For a strategic, systemic and systematic approach, here’s what you need to prioritise:

1. First, optimise business processes: organise work streams and job roles so that a person’s wholejob can be done remotely. Remote work is optimised when workers can work from anywhere, all the time, not just some of the time.

2. Standardise your collaboration tools: more than email and WhatsApp, there’s a plethora of apps to satisfy common functions in many industries. The more each worker needs to switch between teams, the greater the need to limit tool variety across teams. For example:

- For shared file storage: DropBox and Google Drive.

- For task management and document collaboration: Office 365, G Suite (Google Docs, Sheets etc.), Trello and Slack.

- Free virtual meeting platforms: Skype, Zoom, WebEx, Discord.

3. Collaboration rules: ensure collaboration works without friction. When everyone’s in the same office, it’s easy calling an ad hoc meeting by just shouting loud enough. That’s impossible in a remote set-up. But having the right tool is no good if people have different ways of using it. E.g. when more than one person speaks at a time in a video call, it’s nearly impossible to actually take in what’s said. So agree on team practices for daily or weekly meeting times, time slots where everyone is expected to be available impromptu, rules of procedure, like how you take turns to speak, and which content is allowed on chat forums, plus a plethora of other courtesies and considerations to ease the flow.

4. Evolve the governance: for co-located teams, a surprisingly high ratio of work allocation and progress updating happens informally. Getting work done without these touchpoints needs formal protocols. A simple team dashboard to plan capacity, track work in progress and see each other’s pipeline helps everyone stay attuned to who is busy with what, keeping the team unified around the common objectives.

5. Support self-management: Working from home is loaded with distractions. No matter how much we love our family, I know many parents who gleefully return to work after maternity leave and school holidays for the pleasure of starting and finishing a task in one go. Help your team manage their work hours and integrate the demands on their schedule between work and domestic duties. The more the physical work space can be separated from the kitchen counter, the easier it is to manage distractions. “Distraction” goes both ways: a physical work space boundary helps workers switch off work mode when they aren’t “at work”. This area is easiest for mature-minded, goal-oriented workers, regardless of their age.

6. Adapt your leadership style: the biggest challenge with losing in-person contact is literally losing the connection with each other. In-office working relationships are underpinned by continual non-work “check-ins”, banter and gossip. Each encounter is loaded with visual and other non-verbal messages which, aggregated over time, are like a movie’s soundtrack, adding depth and meaning to our work experience. Remote work almost completely eliminates the opportunities for social interaction. Even with good quality video meetings, subtle gestures and facial nuances are depleted, leaving mainly gross motion sight and audio as the only sensory channels. The loss compared to in-person communication is like downscaling from a 50-piece chamber orchestra to an out-of-sync amateur quartet. When the background music is bad or missing, it’s easy to misinterpret a playful jibe on a text or email as “that guy just being a jerk again”. This all adds to the most common complaint of remote workers being the loneliness. So as leader, consciously design your team’s interactions to compensate for this loss of connection.

With the world’s current and correct focus on flattening the Coronavirus infection curve, joining the panic would be effortless. So stop, breathe deeply, and think about the big picture like the visionary you are.

Now, tell me how you can strategically exploit the benefits of remote working. Let’s share the learning.