Leadership, Growth and Hedging

I work with a lot of small and mid-sized businesses. Some call me because they've grown very quickly and need help. Others I speak with seem to have stayed the same size into their second and third generations of ownership. When I was the GM of a start-up pest management operation, we grew our region from four techs to a dozen in just over two years. When I started marketing HR and management services to pest management firms (as well as construction and trades organizations) in 2013, I was surprised at how many 40+ year old companies still operate with only five or six workers.

Does this mean those stable, smaller companies are not as good as the fast-growing, constantly-changing companies? Of course not. Those owners have generally settled into a size that they are comfortable with, earn a living they are satisfied with, and don't want the headaches associated with growing any larger. I get it! 

But I worked for an organization with a clear vision of what we were trying to become, a solid infrastructure to support a growing operation, and systems that enabled us to meet our goals. The companies I work with that say they want to grow but are having difficulty doing so sometimes struggle because the owner/leader has difficulty creating momentum. One behavior that I observe from those leaders that can't seem to get the organization to bust through to the next level is what I call hedging. Here's an example of hedging:

In one of my corporate roles, a division leader asked me to help him roll out a CRM. He had already picked-out the one he wanted - he just needed me to handle the logistics. I did all the set-up with the vendor, communicated with the sales team, and coordinated the implementation and training. Shortly after the roll-out, he stuck his head in my door and said, Your CRM ain't working. He'd overheard a sales rep complaining about it in the hall. That's when I realized he had been sitting in the shadows waiting to see if his initiative was going to be popular. Once he heard the first complaint, it became my CRM. That's hedging.

Another version of hedging is when a productive employee threatens to quit and the owner makes all kinds of concessions and promises to that employee to keep from being inconvenienced. Once the storm passes, the owner often regrets the concessions and forgets about the promises. The employee never forgets about the promises and remains a lukewarm contributor - a victim of hedging.

Hedging can be intentional - like in the first example where the leader chose to stick a surrogate out front as a human shield to take the arrows in case things go wrong rather than own the initiative. Another example of intentional hedging is when the leader is reluctant to commit to a plan or a direction. As an old professor of mine used to say, If we aim at nothing, we hit it 100% of the time!  Perhaps fear of missing goals makes some leaders hesitant to define any.

Hedging can also derive from panic - like the second example. Owners convince themselves if a particular event comes to pass, they're screwed. In my experience those fears are often overstated. 

Former NFL football coach Bum Phillips said about hall of fame coach, Don Shula, He can take his'n and beat your'n and he can take your'n and beat his'n. When I look back at the best CEOs and COOs I had the pleasure of working with, they never allowed themselves to believe that their organization depended exclusively on one or two people and wouldn't survive if those people went away. They were confident in the vision they had for the organization and they were confident they could surround themselves with people who shared the vision, even if other talented individuals decided to leave. Those panic-driven owners would often be better off if the under-committed but perceived-to-be-irreplaceable employee left and a fully committed replacement was identified, even if the replacement is less talented.

My favorite definition of leadership is, A leader is someone who has followers. Leaders have lots of styles - some are extroverted, some are introverted, some are charismatic, others not so much, etc. But one thing all leaders seem to have in common is that they know where they are going and they are able to communicate that vision to people who are happy to follow them toward that desired state. 

It's fine to struggle creating the vision (or the next vision) - that's what strategic planning is all about. But once a set of goals and a path to achieve them is established, a leader is fully committed to the plan and enthusiastically promotes it. Or to put it the way a teacher at my middle school put it, This train don't go but one way, and it don't supply pencils.