Is your business too dependent on you?

A vital part of all successful companies is an effective leader/leadership team.

In the modern world, the role of this leader has changed, moving from traditional hierarchical structures to more collaborative methods. It’s all about managing the various stakeholder groups and balancing their needs.

As a leader, you must inspire those around you. This might sound quite grandiose, but this essentially means utilising other people, whether this is employees, clients, or suppliers. Beyond having a concept for the future of the organisation and knowing what actions to take to attain this, getting others to understand these concepts and buy into them, is the mark of a truly inspirational leader.

A limiting mindset – Unchanging leadership style

In my work as coach, I consider companies in three ways:

Start-ups – These are new business that have only just been created. Their organisational structures tend to be pragmatic, whatever can get them afloat, with some market share.

Adolescents – These organisations are more established, having found their place in the market and are probably experiencing relative success. However, they tend to have suboptimal aspects that are restricting their further growth.

Mature – These companies have recognised the people, processes and systems that were not working for them during adolescence and have improved/replaced them. This has allowed them to achieve sustainable success, with a continual eye on the future.

In terms of leadership, start-ups are very leader centric. They rely on a strong hand at the tiller to guide them through the early challenges they may face. Once they have navigated these choppy waters, they move into adolescence, where they tend to maintain some of these leadership tropes, most notably overdependence on one or a few people at the top of the organisation.

It is important for businesses that want to mature and reach their potential that they, move beyond this reliance and towards a style of leadership that best suits their purposes.

A missing element – Don’t let dependency develop

Dependency on one, or a few, leaders can detrimentally affect the wider company and the individuals.

If an adolescent stage business relies too heavily on the leader/leadership team to run its day-to-day operations, something is wrong. By this point, other employees should feel confident and qualified enough to take charge of activities without too much involvement from their supervisors. Of course, there will be circumstances which they require support to deal with, but they should be broadly independent, allowing their leaders to focus on more strategic matters.

If this is not the case in your company, then its progress and development will be nowhere near as efficient as it could be.

Alongside this, leaders who are too ingrained within each process will begin to feel the strain. Constantly fire-fighting operational challenges is exhausting, not just because of the workload, but because switching focus will multiply the chance of mistakes, demanding further attention. It is often the case that leaders who keep their organisation dependent on them, find their job unfulfilling and risk burnout.

A different perspective – Aim for autonomy

I encourage my clients to evolve their leadership style alongside their business, to best align with its targets, as well as theirs.

The first step to this is considering how you can spread responsibility to maximise efficiency. Who within your company would be suitable for a promotion? If you can’t think of anyone, think of the skillset you require and look into hiring someone. It can feel like a bit of wrench to surrender some of the tasks you are so used to carrying out, but you have to trust your colleagues. It’s not selfish to feel this way; you have worked hard to get the organisation to its current position, but keeping it dependent on your input is unsustainable.

A vital ingredient of being inspirational is demonstrating that you are willing to put your faith in others. Empower the people around you and they are most likely to meet, or even surpass, your expectations. After a while you will find you have a more autonomous business, that you can trust to run independent of your input. You still have one of the most important roles, but it is far more reassuring to know that can step back and get on with initiatives that most compliment your skillet, or that you find most enjoyable.

Being inspirational doesn’t have to mean leading from front, find the balance that works for you and your business.