Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield

Courtesy of Lumen Strategies

Growing should be a decision, not a given (see Grow or Die, is that true?) but IF you choose to grow, there are pains and considerations.   To be sure, there’s pain associated with not growing, but we tend to expect that.  What’s often unexpected, are problems that accompany growth.  Many would argue these are problems they want, but they’re problems nonetheless.

Tim Keller wrote an article- The Process of Church Growth- aimed obviously at growth strategies and considerations for the growth of a church.  But, I find his ideas helpful in terms of business growth.

• A large business is not simply a bigger version of a small company.  They are two different creatures. 

The leadership skills, communication methods, team building, and decision making processes required are very different.  This is why many businesses plateau in growth; they don’t recognize or incorporate the changes necessary.

• Imposing a “size culture practice” on a business that does not have that size will wreak havoc, and eventually force the business back into the size with which those practices are compatible. (Keller, loosely paraphrased)

I notice this more with founders and leaders who cannot bring themselves to relinquish control.  This reticence is understandable.  Many small business founders poured everything they had into starting the business, working long hours, and pinching every penny. In fact, that micromanagement  was essential to survival.

Now, their business has grown, they have other people employed, and they still want to minutely manage every aspect of the business.  Two things happen:

1. You cannot keep highly motivated and energized employees
2. You overlook business opportunities. 

I managed a growing and very profitable service department for a company.  The founders of this successful company had founded it on a shoestring, and had worked hard to build it up.

On one occasion one of them came to me furious after discovering that we’d overlooked invoicing some overnight freight bills.  It amounted to about $100.  He insisted that I go through boxes of invoices to determine how many others we’d overlooked.

After spending about an hour doing this, with no results, I went to his office.  I asked him to reconsider whether  he actually wanted his national service manger spending time hunting down small amounts of overlooked freight bills?  Thankfully, he said “no, just please make sure we have systems in place to ensure they are being invoiced.”

His initial response is emblematic of the issue many founders have to face.   You can’t run a company with numbers of employees like you ran one with two.  The economies of scale simply don’t work for chasing pennies and overlooking large dollar opportunities.

Delegation is more than assigning jobs; you have to trust the people to whom you delegate.  And that means trusting them to make decisions.  If you think that’s easy, then you’ve never founded a small company and watched it grow.

Changes are necessary for growth.  Stacy Karacostas says she uses three rules of thumb to know when changes need to happen.

1. I have months of data showing me I am not on track to meet my goals.
2. I find myself complaining about the same problem three or more times.
3. When presented with a better idea or system for my business.

Want to grow your company?  Great, have fun; just be aware of the issues.

Eddie

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart  is famous for saying that while the definition of pornography might be vague, “I know it when I see it.” Not to equate leadership with porn, but most of us know it when we see it, whether we can define it or not.

John Maxwell, author of “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” says that “everything rises and falls on leadership.”  He’s exactly right.

All of us have experienced bad leadership in some form.  Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich” many years ago, in which he interviewed the most successful men and women in America over a twenty year period.  Many people have noted the attributes that Hill detailed for being successful.

But he also listed 10 major causes of failed leadership.  They are:

1. Inability to organize details
2. Unwillingness to render humble service
3. Expectations of being paid for what you know, rather than for what you do.
4. Fear of competition from followers
5. Lack of imagination
6. Selfishness
7. Intemperance
8.  Disloyalty (to his associates, those above him, and those below him)
9. Emphasis on the ‘authority’ of leadership
10. Emphasis on title

I want to talk about a few of those, but add something related: Leaders that fail to lead.

It’s frustrating to attempt following a leader that refuses to lead.  Advanced Business Consulting cites a study that says 70% of employees have the feeling their leader has no idea of what they’re doing.

Leaders MUST lead.  They need to equip their followers with the tools and information they need to do their jobs efficiently.  Leadership is not a passive occupation, it’s hard work.  It’s also the key to success for any enterprise.

Leaders must be genuine.  

If you look over the list that Napoleon Hill compiled of failed leadership traits, you’ll note that many of them can be lumped under this.  The arrogant know it all,  lording it over subordinates, leaning on his title, and suspicious and jealous of his followers is precisely the person that no one wants to follow.

Many of us, including me, grew up with sort of a military philosophy of leadership.  The strong stalwart leader, standing alone, barking orders that are to be obeyed without question.

Interestingly, there are actually times when that kind of leadership works, at least temporarily.  Those times are always crisis situations. If an infantry platoon is ambushed, the leader doesn’t have time to be nice or seek consensus.  And everyone in the platoon accepts this because their lives depend upon it.

But, even in the military, that brand of leadership is not encouraged or practiced by successful officers outside of a crisis situation.  One of the reasons the soldiers obey his orders during an ambush, is that the officer has helped to prepare them. He’s trained alongside and helped them become proficient at their tasks.  He’s promoted an esprit de corps, and a shared vision.  The soldiers have come to see their platoon officer as a genuine leader whom they trust.

In Stephen Ambrose’s great book “Band of Brothers” he interviews members of Easy Company  about their beloved commander, Major Winters. One told him, “we would do anything for him, we just hated to let him down.”  That’s leadership.

Winters, a courageous tough commander, was also an humble servant, who viewed his job as helping his men be successful. This led to the organizational success he was vaunted for.  Look over the list of failing leadership traits listed by Hill again;  Winters exhibited none of them.

Be genuine

Leaders MUST communicate.  

I often joke and say that whenever I see two people in a fight, I always coach the one on the bottom, because that’s where I have the most experience!   I can coach leaders that communicate poorly, in part, because I’ve often fallen so short in this area myself.

Many people in leadership positions enjoy talking about their “vision.”  Here’s the problem, as long as it is your vision, getting it implemented is an uphill battle.   This where the dirty little work that all type A personalities hate comes into play, and that word is “process.”

You can not just “tell” your vision, you must move the ownership from you to your team.  The way this happens is that you open yourself up to input from others, and allow changes so that it becomes a shared vision.  Once that happens, great things can occur.

You must communicate, communicate, and communicate again to your team members and employees, and don’t overlook the less obvious team members.

Many years ago, I planned and promoted a significant  church event which involved considerable advertising.  I did a great job of assembling a team to help, went through a process, got buy in from everyone, and thought I had it nailed.

But.. I forgot to tell the people in the office that would be answering the phones.  People began calling in response to our considerable promotional activities, and the people answering the phone knew nothing whatsoever about. Very embarrassing.

We live in an age where people are bombarded with messages all day every day.  The idea that you can issue a memo, or an email and think you’ve adequately communicated anything, is a huge mistake.

Empower People

Empowerment is an amazing leadership tool.   Your legacy as a leader is not so much in what you accomplish, as it is what the people you lead accomplish.   Employees will gladly assume ownership once empowered.  It adds meaning and significance to their lives.

And finally..  learn to be humble.   

Renowned author and researcher Jim Collins says that the number one attribute of great leaders is humility.  In fact, in his book “How the Mighty Fall” he says the number one step to failure, is “hubris born of success.”  In other words, arrogance.

Arrogant people don’t learn, because in their minds, they already know everything.  The leaders most susceptible to this are those that have experienced some degree of success.  Because of their accomplishments, they assume they now know it all, and therein lay the seeds of failure.  The old Testament says that “pride goes before a fall,” and many leaders have learned that lesson the hard way.

Be successful, let your organization rise, not fall, on your leadership.  View yourself as an humble servant, work hard, and measure success by the accomplishments of those under you.

Famed Alabama coach Bear Bryant would always give his team players the credit when they won.   But when they lost, he always shouldered the blame. That’s the mark of a great leader.

Eddie

“I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease.  Harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages.  Easier to detect, but harder to cure in the later.” Jim Collins When I first founded EMA, I would panic if we had a bad month. The panic wasn’t  completely unfounded, I had limited resources and  wouldn’t have survived too many bad ones.  Conversely, I would be almost giddy when we had a good month.  What I learned over time, was to control my emotions a bit, and keep a more even keel. Almost every organization, even very healthy ones, experience downturns.  On the other hand, very unhealthy ones can have a temporary upturn.  The wisdom is knowing the difference between a blip and trend. Author and business researcher Jim Collins wrote “How the Mighty Fall” in which he chronicled stages of business decline. Collins suggests there are five stages to decline:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

Honestly, the one that frightens me the most is number one, hubris (or arrogance) born of success.  “I/We are great because we do/know certain things,” as opposed to understanding WHY these things we do or know work for us. I see this all the time in others, and to be honest, have seen it in myself.  All of us like to think highly of ourselves, and if we’ve experienced career or business success, it confirms our opinion. It’s a recipe for disaster.  Arrogant people don’t learn, and the moment you stop paying attention to what’s going on in your organization, the market, and within yourself- you’ve taken the first step to failure. I don’t accept president Obama’s “you didn’t build that” statement.  But, neither is it true that any of us achieve success entirely on our own. I was fortunate early in my career to work for two incredible entrepreneurs that taught me not only the technicals of the electronic motor drive business, but allowed me to take a leadership role in a growing company.  They also put up with a lot of mistakes, and I’m forever grateful to them. The undisciplined pursuit of more is another big problem.  Growth has ruined companies and the people that led them.  (See Grow or Die, is that true?) Denial of risk and peril goes along with hubris.  “We’re a great company; our customers love us; our competition is inferior to us.”  Often said, without a shred of objective data to back that opinion up. A number of years ago we landed a big job, in fact at that time, the biggest job we’d ever gotten.  It took a lot of our resources, but it was very profitable.  When that project ended about a year later, I began to have some nagging unease about our company.   We seemed to have lost our edge, but everyone was telling me different. I hired an outside consultant to help, and an indepth and unemotional analysis confirmed my suspicions. We were losing ground in every area.  The large project had distracted me and allowed a number of unresolved issues to fester. We were in denial.  Fortunately, we got out of it. When you find yourself blaming external forces for your problems, you’re in trouble. It’s empowering to take personal responsibility, and its the first step to resolution.   IF I am the problem, then I am the solution. Many companies that find themselves in decline start grabbing at straws.  Hire a superstar, go after another market, begin supplying more products and services, can all be desperate attempts. And, the research indicates they rarely work. Here’s some hints on avoiding decline: First of all, stay humble and pay attention to your business. Never assume you deserve success; it has to be constantly  earned.  You MUST provide excellent services and products, and you must be friendly and accessible. Be sure you have the right people in the right seats in your company.  This is a primary leadership responsibility.  Building a success culture, and instilling it in your people is your job. Rather than trying new things, the path out of a decline is often returning to good leadership and business practices.  There’s a great story of a fast food company CEO who was hired to pull the company out of a terrible decline.  Prior to beginning his job he visited many of their stores. At his first meeting, people were telling him the reasons for decline, ranging from changing consumer tastes to increased competition. He interrupted them and said, “the problem with this company is dirty bathrooms and surly employees, and we are going to fix that starting right now.”  The company did indeed turn around.  Never ignore the basics of your business; it’s easy to stray from them. In a decline..  here’s a few steps to consider:

1. Put all emotion aside and deal with the scary truth.  This may mean getting some outside help. Don’t underestimate your own hubris.
2. Avoid the temptation to blame external factors. Accept responsibility.
3. Be diligent in rectifying systemic failures in your customer service or operations.
4. Do not grab at straws.  Hiring the competition’s best salesperson usually does not work.
5. Back to basics.  Why do customers use you? What’s an ideal customer look like?
6. Fight!  Most companies can,  in fact,  be turned around.

Eddie Mayfield