Helping us deliver better performances
So you think you can manage a business – but can you direct one?
Paper Entitled;
‘In order for business to flourish, Senior Executives must direct and not manage!’
Unless executives properly delegate, businesses stagger from problems to problems, inevitably reaching crisis. They also underperform and inevitably deliver diluted results.
Excellent managers are vitally important BUT excellent manager’s telephones are always ringing, they are constantly in meetings or in discussions with staff, their inboxes are full, their emails are only slowly returned (sometimes never), and they work long, long hours!
They also move on from one formidable challenge to the next one, without learning lessons or analysing past or present performance and without delegating responsibilities. Excellent managers are recognised for what they are – excellent managers, but they are not respected as excellent Directors.
Inevitably their businesses continually face bottlenecks.
The businesses they manage cannot grow.
Excellent managers are in grave danger of creating their own management bottlenecks.
Excellent managers continually feel that ‘they are getting there!
Excellent managers are always incredibly committed and very, very busy but their immense efforts are often unfocussed and they do not manage their own time efficiently. Their business approach and emphasis is unrecognised as business transformers as they constantly provide only short term solutions.
The result being that without personal corporate evolution and development, the business eventually owns them and not vice versa!
Their well-intentioned but flawed emphasis is often on developing growth, improving corporate profile and broadening the organisation, instead of delivering urgently needed profit and badly needed sales related income and above all, vital cash flow. This seriously exposes organisations to cash flow difficulties and constantly recurring corporate peaks and troughs.
What can be the inevitable corporate consequences if such excellent managers are not themselves, properly directed?
Well consider the following. if excellent managers are promoted to executive Directorships and yet continue to act as managers then they are simply unable and ill-prepared to deliver effective mid to long term strategies and solutions. They do not provide the systematic platforms and the repetitive organisational systems required to attain an environment for sustainable growth and cannot generate a corporate environment of profitability through embedded transformation.
Does this ring a bell? If so read on ……..
Excellent Directors;
In the majority of cases, Excellent Directors were once excellent managers but had the business ‘nous’ to step back, evaluate and evolve. Not every excellent manager can do this however, despite their diligence and corporate ambition.
Excellent Directors own the business – the business does not own them.
The ‘owner’ Director thinks strategically and can do so because he has Executive Directors and Executive management whom he identified and appointed to undertake specific roles and responsibilities for the next tier of managers to supervise and manage.
This model enables sustainable growth and corporate development to emerge from effectively harnessing this strategic, systematic mid to long term strategy.
The Executive Director ‘ownership’ model delivers the potential for engendering long term scalability and the emergence of a self-sustaining, repeatable model.
This classic comparison demonstrates the difference between Excellent Managers ‘working in businesses’ and Excellent Directors ‘working on their businesses’.
How excellent do you wish to be?