If you run a small business, you surely have encountered operational difficulties along the way.
Low productivity, absenteeism, various errors and lack of motivation are just some of the situations that may be deteriorating your results. You look for solutions from traditional sources and discover that the old authoritarian management advice does not give good returns.
Putting more controls and exercising tighter supervision only adds costs. Punishing your collaborators reduces their motivation even more and increases your problems. Your personal time is consumed in putting out fires instead of generating new business.
What are you waiting for to start managing your company in a different way?
For starters, set aside for the moment what you think you know about managing your staff. Later you can compare it with my recommendations and make your own decision.
Let's agree on one thing: if the traditional management style worked as well as it is said, you would not be trying to solve these problems but counting money.
Do you want your company to produce more and better? Stop pushing your people and start working with them.
But I don't mean you get to do his job. No way.
What I mean is that, as a leader, you are part of the team. You are part of it. You are not "on the other side of the counter" as sometimes thought. Those stories of antagonism and fighting only serve interests that are not yours.
We all work for two main reasons. We do it because we like it or we do it for money. And when the two things coincide, an incredible phenomenon occurs. Excellent performance arises.
You like having an income that allows you to live in a certain comfort. But if you had to earn it in exchange for an activity that was unbearable, you would get sick or give up. And to make up for it, income should be really important.
The same happens to your people, because human nature is the same in all of us.
We don't need to talk about money. In greater or less quantity, it is all of the same class. But when we talk about "doing what we like", the motivations skyrocket to infinity.
Do we do it to grow professionally, to be recognized, to help others, to learn new things or just to have fun?
And what would you think if you could have all of that together? Wouldn't it be an incredible feeling? Carry out an activity that meets all your professional and personal expectations and that also provides you with an income that could grow with your results.
Now imagine that all your collaborators feel the same. That each one knows that they can trust the others because they have a common purpose that satisfies them all. That in your company they have the opportunity to grow like never before. That they trust you because you are one of the team, only with greater responsibilities and a long-term vision in which they also trust. That they respect you, because you respect them.
I assure you that this is possible. I have verified it.
It requires you to think of people a little differently, starting with yourself. You must understand that you have strengths and weaknesses and that your collaborators also have them. That true teamwork consists of functioning in such a way that the weaknesses of each one are compensated by the strengths of the others.
You know that people can bring out the best in us when we feel supported. Surely you have experienced it in yourself. Only to that extent can we grow and without personal growth, forget about achieving good results.
This is why bi-leadership postulates that only great people can build great teams. And you cannot achieve excellence in an environment of continuous conflict and confrontation.
Take advantage of the relative advantages that smallness provides you. It is easier to align the wills of a few people than those of many.
A small and well-established team becomes powerful, flexible and can achieve fluid communication among its members. Respond quickly to any request. There is nothing better to face your competition and in particular if they are bigger companies than yours.
This all sounds great, but how do you do it?
To begin, meet with your people and agree with them on the cultural bases of your "new" operation. What values do they share? What attitudes does each of them respect? Why do they work with you? Are they satisfied with what they do?
You can add all the questions you can think of and let them ask them too. There is nothing worse than group monologues.
And avoid getting into small discussions. That Carlitos yesterday said such a thing to me, that Marita took the tool from me, that Diego is poorly dressed… Avoid personalization. Don't let your brainstorming session turn into a soap opera.
What I do recommend is that you make sure you agree on some core values for teamwork. There are codes that must be respected in any case and by anyone, because otherwise you cannot dream of achieving it.
One of them is honesty, and I would say that it is probably the only one that cannot be missed. Arguably all the others derive from it. If you don't say and do what you really think, you are fooling everyone.
Another is reliability, that ability to get others to believe what you promise. Let them know that your word is sacred. That you are going to comply no matter what happens, because otherwise you would not have opened your mouth.
And the last one I suggest is responsibility, probably the most difficult to put into practice, because whoever takes responsibility for something is exposed to criticism and sanction. So no one likes to admit that he was wrong.
But whoever shirks his responsibility for an error is deteriorating the other two values. It is both dishonest and unreliable. It embodies the team's seed of destruction.
And you don't want that. You must do whatever it takes so that these three values are always respected.
How can you do it?
Start by changing your traditional policy regarding those who make mistakes. It has been shown that more than 90% of failures in any operation have their causes far from where they have manifested themselves. If you punish the "guilty" it is as if you killed the messenger. And from now on everyone will be very careful to hide their own mistakes, until it's too late.
Therefore, you must turn your team members into a brigade whose mission is to detect and investigate faults, instead of ending up as victims of your witch hunt. And operational errors are investigated in processes, not people.
I repeat: in a failed operation there are no "guilty persons" but "guilty processes". It is very healthy for mistakes to be made as a result of something being done wrong, no matter who does it.
When things are viewed from this perspective, people are more willing to recognize their share of responsibility for failures and to change the way they work in order to avoid them. Which improves their reliability and ultimately demonstrates their honesty.
It's what you wanted, right?
But remember: As a leader, you must be the first to do what you proclaim. If you make laws, abide by them too. There is no better way to teach than the example itself.
And you have a lot to earn.
