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Are You A Manager Or A Leader?

TRANSCRIPT

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey, so this week I have a question for you. All you a manager or a leader in your business. If you had a bit of a visceral response to that question, maybe a shutter. Slightly sick feeling. You're probably not alone. What I'm seeing a lot of at the moment is entrepreneurs are looking to grow their businesses, but worrying about how to manage a team. And then on the flip side, CEO's talking about leading their team, but using examples of management activities. So I want to talk about these two options. And let's see if we can get some clarity around the question today. So management is. All about. Directing monitoring, controlling towards an outcome. It sounds fairly unpleasant, right? Personally, it takes just about everything I have to manage myself. Through a day, right. To manage myself, to get out of bed, to make myself eat healthy food, to make sure I go for a walk to make sure I get enough sleep and drink enough water. And I still get annoyed with me. So what I really want somebody else managing me. Or to manage control, direct monitor somebody else. Leadership then is about influencing coaching and developing. But let's be clear. We need both of these in our business. Leadership sets the vision inspires the team towards it. Management implements that vision. But can we all agree just before we go. Any further that we manage a process, a system, a timeline, a budget. Some thing. And we lead people. Now that we're all clear on the distinction that I'll be using. I want you to understand that in your small business, you might be a leader and a manager. You might be setting the vision and responsible for executing it. There's a great Stephen Covey quote. It talks about management being responsible for climbing the ladder of success. And leadership being responsive. Sensible. To make sure. That the Neta is up against the right wall. Right. I'm paraphrasing. It's not the exact quote, but you know, the one, I mean, So you could be doing both of those things for your business. You could be finding the wall, leaning the ladder against it. Figuring out how to climates. You could be responsible for all of it. But as you grow your business and your team, some of those management responsibilities may need to be handed over to give you more capacity to lead. If we think about leadership, traditional leadership focused on the shareholder. So the goal was to increase your turns to get more investments. The more investments you got the better you could serve your customers, the better you served your customers, the happier they would be in the more money that they would spend. Right. And all of that allowed your employees to then get paid. And for those of us who have been in traditional businesses with traditional leadership, or I'm sure you have friends who've been in that environment, you know, that traditionally employees came last. And what does that lead to? It leads to high turnover. It leads to burnout. It leads to feeling you don't really have any power in that situation at all. I can remember saying to a teammate when I left my corporate job. So it didn't feel like it mattered. Whether I came to work the next day. Not just from a kind of, oh, what is my purpose in life kind of vibe, but just honestly, That it didn't matter that it was me that did my job. It was, there were other people who could step in and fill in that gap. Right. Almost that kind of like faceless drone mentality of like, oh, one's gone. Just pop another one in. That's not an inspiring or motivating place to be. So, what we're seeing a shift towards now is a more servant leadership style that focuses on employees first. So the idea is that the leadership creates a really compelling vision. And that vision inspires the team. And then the leaders will coach and develop the individuals. Within the team to deliver the best customer experience possible. That incredible customer experience then creates raving fans who spend more money. And. The shareholder. Okay. You, the business owner. Gets increased returns. If you listened to the last episode I was talking about where your responsibility shifts from being client experience to being team experience, because they now manage the client experience for you. It shifts into how can I help my team to be amazing so that they can be amazing to our customers and everything else falls into place. Unsurprisingly in the entrepreneur world, this kind of work environment often feels like a better fit for us. It feels more aligned because most of us got into business to avoid having. Our time and our energy being controlled by someone else. Right. So why would we want to do that to somebody else? But the bonuses that it also yields incredible results. Happy teams have increased sales, increased productivity and crucially for our small businesses drastically reduced team turnover. There were multiple studies done on this topic. I'm going to share some of the exact stats over on my social media, but I want to give you a real world CEO example of this. So about seven years ago, Dan price, who is the CEO of gravity payments. Raise the minimum salary for his employees and his company to 70,000 us dollars a year. He understood that they were struggling in Seattle, which is an expensive market to pay their rent, to save up for a home. And so coming from that servant leadership perspective or what do my people need to be their best at work? Well, frankly, they probably need to not be worrying about how to pay rent. This was the move that he made. And he slashed his own salary by 1.1 million a year to help fund it. At the time, social media exploded with people being on one end. This is the most amazing boss ever and people on the other end being you're going to fail. You'll be out of business. You're going bankrupt. However, if you're familiar with the story that this was not the case. His tweet from the 13th of April, 2021 reads six years ago today, I raised my company's minimum wage to 70 K Fox news called me a socialist whose employees would be on the bread line. Since then our revenue has tripled. We're a Harvard business school case study and our employees have had a 10 X boob in home's bought. So, this is an incredible example of a company leader, listening to his employees. Figuring out what they needed. And providing it. Even when he needed to sacrifice something of his own. And then seeing that knock on effect, increased productivity, increased profits. The company's profits have grown year after year, but then also think about it from the turnover perspective. If that's the kind of leadership that you have, are you inspired to stay there? Are you inspired to apply to work there? Would you want to catch your job? Right. Now I get it. There's a reason that when you look at servant leader, examples, people like mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela come up. Right. This isn't a. Quick leadership change it. Isn't something that's a bunch of tactics. It's almost complete mindset shift. Where. Your entire focus goes onto what do other people need? Ahead of what do I need? So while we can all aspire to this kind of leadership. It takes time to understand what your team needs, not just in business, but personally as well. Right. We're talking holistically. How can you support your employees? It takes time to talk to them, to coach them, to mentor them to be their best as well. And time is often not a resource that's more business CEOs have. So how can we take a step in that direction? I think the first step towards it is really having an awareness. Of which hat you're wearing. At what moment in time? So I'll often have people do this when we're talking about them burning out as a CEO, you know, Are you in a CEO hat or a sales hat, a marketing hat and operations hat, a finance hat, right. In this situation, I want you to think about, am I. Taking care of a management responsibility. Or a leadership responsibility. Are you working out what the next steps are or how to implement that vision? When you have the manager hat on your focus on what's going on right now. When you've got your leader hat on, you're focused on the future. If you have your leader hat on, you're trying to innovate. You're trying to have ideas. If you have your manager hat on, you're implementing. Being able to assess how much time you're spending in each hat is really important for you to begin to assess how you can hand over the manager role. If you need to be spending more time developing the leadership side. If you want to give more time to listening to our employees, to coaching, to developing, to mentoring, something has to give right. Now, again, your business needs both managers and leaders. They need to work hand in hand. Have the vision implement the vision. Think about the future. Make sure we're hitting towards it right now in the presence. Have the great new idea. Implement the new idea. But if you're looking to step up your leadership, that's gonna take time. It's going to take time for you to personally develop, but it's also gonna take time for you to listen to your team. To listen to what they need and for you to figure out how to get there. But you know me, I am. Always a practical one. I don't want to leave you with, Hey, it's going to take some time. That's not super helpful. So let's talk about something that you can practically look at in your business right now. I want to dive into a business management concept, which is the rule of seven. , I can't remember who. I did the study on this, but the rule of seven, essentially says that you can have. Seven direct reports, right? It says that you can effectively manage Semon direct reports, but we're going to change that to effectively lead seven direct reports. Remember, we're not managing people. We're leading people. Now, there are a couple of reasons for this. If you think about. Each direct report. Traditionally. Each direct report needs at least an hour of your time every week. And that can be a cross interaction. That doesn't mean that every direct report is necessarily having a one-to-one meeting for an hour every single week. So if you have seven direct reports, That's seven hours a week. That's essentially a full Workday that you are spending. So if you're in that kind of manager and leader role, you're also then responsible for tasks and projects alongside that. So you have only got 80% of your week left to do your manager role. So once you go beyond seven, that starts to eat into your week. Now, also think about that traditionally, an hour a week. If you want to be in that servant leader space. That's going to take more time to train and develop and coach your team. So that one hour a week is going to expand. The second reason is from a neuroscience perspective, our human working memory has been determined to be surprise seminar items. Right? So your ability to remember. What an individual team member is working on dealing with their strengths, their weaknesses, their capacity starts to get really limited when you go beyond seven direct reports. Now before anyone gets upset, but some people. It's a new guy there. Weren't going to manage six direct reports for others. It's going to be easy at nine and it depends on a few different things. For example. If you are, or you have a brand new team meta, so it's the first time you or they are leading a team. They may need more time to develop those skills. So you might not want to dive in right away with seven to nine people. You might want to have a smaller team. And allow them to focus on developing those listening skills, coaching skills, mentoring skills. Alongside their management of the process. Uh, budget, timeline, et cetera. If the team is immature and I don't mean. That personally immature. I mean, there are new team, whether that's a completely brand new team or a new combination of people, or they're new to the business, or they're new to the industry, you may need to spend more time with them. More development, more training, more coaching, right. So you see in these situations where that hour a week starts to stretch. And your capacity to manage things alongside. That leadership. Starts to reduce. One of the things to look at right away is if you are one of your leadership team is starting to burn out. You have two options, one, you can reduce the team size. Or you can reduce the management responsibility that's happening alongside that. Hey, those are the two leavers that you have to pull in that space. Do you need a smaller team because the management piece still needs to be happening. Or can you hand over the management piece? So that you can focus on leadership. Remember, you need both. They have to work. Hand-in-hand. So if we go back to what initially brought me into this conversation with you today. If you were growing your business, I don't want you to be afraid of managing a team. Focus rather on how you manage the processes that you plan to hand over. And then consider how can I train, support and coach a team? And the best way to do that is really listening to them. So. The imposter syndrome about, I don't know how to manage a team can be removed. And you can focus on instead. How can I lead that team by listening to them and asking them how I can support them? If you are a CEO, you already have a team. Consider, if you have enough time to lead the way you would like to. If you don't have enough time, currently, there are a couple of areas for you to look at one. Are you still managing processes that you could hand over or two, are you leading a large team of direct reports? It's very popular to have a really flat structure in entrepreneur land. But if you're getting to capacity with that flat structure, it might be time to start thinking about bringing in some leadership help to take over the management responsibilities, whether that's developing someone in your team or hiring someone if no one's available. Now if we're languishing. That control feels really hard if letting go of the things that you, you feel like you need to manage feels really hard. I want you to remember that if you deliver an incredible employee experience or team experience, they in turn will live out an incredible outstanding customer experience, which in turn will create the results. But you and your business.


Entrepreneurs looking to grow, worry about how to manage a team and CEOs talk about leading their team with examples of management responsibilities. Let’s clarify which you want to be.

Key Takeaway

Your business needs both leaders and managers, but it might be best if you’re not wearing both hats.

In This Episode

  • The difference between a manager and a leader
  • Traditional versus servant leadership
  • How you can practically make a leadership change right now

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Disclaimer:

The information contained above is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this podcast episode and article are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this article or episode. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this article. Diane Mayor disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this article.