Will Your Business Survive Your Exit?
By Dieter Jansen, Associate, Legitimate Leadership.
Whether it is a family, a small business, a corporation or a country, the true success of any leader can only be measured by the performance of the entity long after the leader is no longer in charge.
Imagine you have a thriving business with good people. The business grows and sets up the usual hierarchies. The senior management team is established and working well, with managers taking responsibility and accountability for their departments. Business thrives and the measures of success in departments - typically OTIF (On Time and In Full Delivery), financial stability, and production efficiency - are visible and tangible. This goes on for a number of years, the business grows further and the people get older. Some may even be getting close to retirement age.
Supposing someone does leave. The department initially carries on the momentum, but slowly the disciplines fall away - and the measures show the decline. The blame is laid squarely on the shoulders of the current manager, with secret (and sometimes not-so-secret) thoughts of wishing that the previous manager was still in charge, because then things worked. Where can the business get another manager like that?
The problem with this all-too-common way of thinking is that it relies on an ‘individual hero’ kind of leader – someone who gets things done while they are around. The measures and incentives that are implemented often reward this kind of leadership behaviour, even to the point of pride that ‘things don’t work unless I’m around’. At a reunion barbeque it might even be celebrated that the results deteriorated after the leader left, reinforcing the belief in the ‘hero of the day’.
This is ridiculous short-term thinking. In a complex production system (whether products or services), does it make any sense to think that the day one leader leaves and another takes over, there aren’t lag factors that influence the future? It’s like blaming the person who is putting a roof on a building for the cracks in the foundation.
As Capt L David Marquet, captain of US Navy Submarine Sante Fe remarks in his book Turn The Ship Around: ‘Santa Fe performed superbly while I served as its captain. If that had been it, this would be the same personality-driven leadership story that occupies so much space on bookshelves now. Only ten years later can we assess the true success of that work – with Santa Fe’s continued operational excellence and the implausibly high promotion rates for its officers and crew.’
That is why whether it is a family, a small business, a corporation or a country, the true success of any leader can only be measured by the performance of the entity long after the leader is gone. It requires a leader who thinks long-term, doesn’t necessarily require accolades, and has a burning desire to see their direct reports thrive and flourish, and accepts that it is their responsibility to help them do so. This isn’t new. It has been written about for centuries. Yet the individual hero mentality still persists.
This fundamentally puts a business at risk in the medium term. Ensuring that a business is resilient requires putting effort into training and empowering the next level of leaders. In sports it would be called ‘having depth on the bench’. A tell-tale sign that the business has no depth is if senior leaders can never go on leave, or afford to be ill, or even to take some days off from their impossible schedule to be trained on how to empower people so as to build that depth.
At Legitimate Leadership, we provide the framework – that is, the complete How, Why, What, When, Who and Where of what empowerment means and how to implement an empowerment culture.
It challenges conventional thinking and, if leaders are prepared to make the mental shift, sets the scene for an extraordinary and resilient workplace.