Yep, it's true. The very attributes that make someone a good candidate to start a business often make it difficult for them to delegate responsibility and authority. And, as we all know, you can't scale up a business if you won't delegate.  Alas, this is the one of the top leadership challenges I see most often in scaling up a business.  Folks who start businesses tend to be intelligent and ambitious with a broad skill set. They know they're good at a lot of things, and that's why they're willing to take the risk involved in starting a new enterprise. They think, "Hey, that doesn't ..read more

Crazy, right? How can this be?  For starters, nobody is great at everything--we all have strengths and weaknesses. It only makes sense to play to our strengths, but most of us tend to rely too heavily on these strengths to the detriment of the other skills we need to be successful leaders.  I offer final-vetting, pre-hire assessments of leaders, and I'm proud to say we've hired successful leaders over 90% of the time over the last 30 years. In this process we've found that folks who are especially strong in a skill tend to be weak in the complimentary skill.  Of course you ca ..read more

Wow, there's a lot to know in scaling up a business, eh? The media is full of experts telling you what you need to learn and what you need to do in order to succeed. It can feel overwhelming.  In engineering the signal-to-noise ratio describes the level of a desired signal compared to the level of background noise; e.g., being able to hear a speaker clearly on a podcast or video presentation.  There's a lot of good information out there, but how do you know what's really important (signal) and what is only ancillary (noise) in getting the job done? For example, what if (god forbid ..read more

We business men and women love efficiency. What's not to love? Time is money, right?  Why not shoot for 100% efficiency in your organizational design? For goodness sake, you don't want to add the cost of more personnel until everyone on board already is significantly overstretched, right?  Wrong. Here's why: Overstretched team members become fatigued and the quality of their work suffers. Just like their leader, they become reactive instead of creative and proactive.  In addition, team members become disenchanted with your leadership and then disengaged. "If my leader ..read more

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that, as the leader of a business, you have the most power of anyone in your team, and your strengths become the strengths of your business.  Whatever behavior you value and reward multiplies. For example, if you reward integrity, then your team will have an incentive to behave with integrity.  The bad news is that, by the same token, your weaknesses become the weaknesses of the business. Behavior you don't value and reward falls away because there's no advantage for your team to do those things.  For example, if you reward profit ..read more

Your Core Values determine your culture, and, to a large degree, your culture determines the performance of your team. How so?  Leaders often fall prey to The Fundamental Attribution Error (Ross, 1977); i.e., they under attribute the quality of a team member's performance to the limitations of the environment they are in. For example, calling someone "lazy" when they are underpaid and underappreciated.  You can't blame people for maximizing their outcomes/getting the best deal they can for themselves and their families in the situation they are in. If team members feel underpaid and ..read more

Yep, that's what some folks say. I'm not gonna lie, there's some real joy in living in the moment and doing what feels right at the time. However, I believe that if you want to be truly successful in business and in life, you need to clearly define what that success looks like. Otherwise it's hard to prioritize how you're going to spend your main resources: time and money. Do you have a clear vision of success for your organization? For example, if you're going to be a 30M company you may be well staffed, but if you're going to be a 50M company you may need to hire some more folks before you'r ..read more

I had a client who was the CEO of a large manufacturing company. He retired and thought he'd be delightfully happy driving his classic cars and playing golf. After 6 months he was deeply depressed, and he was ecstatic when the company asked him to come back. What happened? He made a common mistake of leaders by buying into The Retirement Myth: "when I have plenty of money and retire I'll finally have the freedom and happiness I've always yearned for." Maybe, but oftentimes not. Happiness comes from a balance among the 4 major sources of happiness, and many leaders are out of balance during the ..read more

,Retrain, Repurpose, or Replace?Terry Dockery, Ph.D. I regularly coach leaders to higher levels of success, but trying to get folks to change their behavior is not always the best path to better business results.  Much of our behavior is driven by emotional stuff we aren't even aware of, and these subconscious emotional drivers sometimes aren't easily changed by rational coaching. Our subconscious emotional makeup was largely formed when were children, and these emotional drivers were designed to help us adapt to the world in which we grew up.  Asking people to change some of their d ..read more

If you haven't read Part 1 of this article, then the basic idea here is that all the businesss success in the world doesn't mean much if you're not happy and enjoying the ride. Part 1 contained my first 5 recommendations, and here are my last 5: When all else fails, lower your standards (perhaps you're being too perfectionistic). We all need social support and validation, but you’ll never please everyone. You don’t need to. Just find those people who love you and value you as you are. A happy marriage (or any other important relationship) consists of a) marrying someone you really like, and b ..read more