As a business owner of a growing enterprise the only way that you can sustain growth and your sanity is by leveraging the power of team. However creating a high performance team is not always plain sailing, even when you have the best support in the business.
The challenge is that many teams are made up of individuals who have different agendas and may not always have the right experience to support the owner in growing the business.
Research by UK accountant Haines Watt discovered that almost one in five senior managers (17%) are actively aware that they have a divergent vision of the business’s future to that of the owner. At the same time, over half (53%) of management teams and business partners are growing a business for the first time.
With so many senior managers working to their own agendas, combined with a lack of experience, business owners can’t be blamed for lacking trust in their teams..
In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni identifies that lack of trust is the foundational cornerstone that prevents the success of a high performing team.
However trust is not the ability of team members to predict another’s behaviour because they have known each other for a long time. Rather, when it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability. It’s about being comfortable and open, even exposed to one another’s failures, weaknesses and fears.
Vulnerability-based trust is predicated on the simple concept that people who aren’t afraid to admit the truth about themselves are not going to engage in office politics and antics that waste everyone’s time and energy, and more importantly make the accomplishment of results highly unlikely.
However, the irony of this research is that 52% of business owners find they can’t be open and honest, masking their concerns from their teams because they are worried about exposing vulnerability. And as you know leadership starts at the top, so if the business owner is not modelling the way, displaying vulnerability-based trust then it is hardly surprising the rest of the team aren’t adopting this behaviour.
Unsurprisingly, across the board this lack of trust, honesty and communication leaves management teams siloed, uninformed and impeded from stepping up and taking more of the day to day running of the business away from the business owners. As a result, owners have less time to plan and think strategically, which in turn prevents them from reaching their growth ambitions.
The creates a vicious cycle where the business owner is stuck working in the business rather than on it and consequently often becomes exhausted as they have not mastered how to leverage their time, talent and team to help enable the change they desire.
If you’d like to learn how to leverage your time, team and talent so that you can create a more purposeful, profitable business then please book in for a complimentary consultation where you are guaranteed to walk away with at least one great idea to help you accelerate your business growth.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
