Success is in managing your teams and not in “doing” the work.
1. Recruit and Manage people well and you will have a great team, with great staff morale and great productivity/profitability and a great life/style with little stress.
2. Even with the right recruit, if managed poorly, you will have poor staff morale, poor productivity/profits, poor lifestyle, and lots of stress.
Poor management of your team will see you constantly dragged back into putting out fires and working in Quad-A (Urgent & Important)
This might sound like common sense, but it’s harder said than done.
Good management is one of the hardest things to do and if done poorly can cause so much damage to so many people around you. Staff, clients/customers, suppliers, and shareholders.
3. So train train trains them and manage manage manage them well.
Don’t do, do, do, the work especially, if you “enjoy it” then you are in the wrong seat.
You should enjoy people to be a good manager.
Get as much management training as you can.
Doing the work is easy.
Managing staff is a skill and an art and very difficult.
But if you want to be successful you have to learn to manage people.
The How – A good leader plays the “ball” and not the “man”.
Don’t blame or judge them (playing the man). Just focus on finding a solution to the problem (playing the ball).
If you are unsure then spend lots of time with them (your team) without blaming or judging.
You cannot go wrong with “overreaching” and spending “more time” than “less time.”
Most problems occur due to spending Too Little time and Not due to spending too much time.
Ask for help.
Having Difficult Conversations
As a leader of your team, you have to have the ability to “confront” situations and have those difficult conversations and not shy away from them otherwise problems fester and grow into bigger problems.
“Confront” is not the same as being “confrontational”.
Having a difficult conversation is made easier by focusing on fixing the problem and not blaming or judging the person.
Try it. Next time one of your staff makes a mistake (no facial expressions) just focus on fixing the problem. No blaming or judging and see how it turns out.
“Confrontational” is blaming the person and having a huge fight over pride, ego, and “being right” rather than the “right solution”.
If you have a manager who cannot confront situations and have difficult conversations than they should not be a leader/Manager.
If they want to be a leader they better learn and get up to speed, otherwise, things will fall apart around them and they will find they are constantly surrounded by problems.
Typically if they spent the same time finding solutions as they spent blaming someone else, problems would not appear to follow them around.
Find a solution and the problem goes away.
Constantly finding solutions and you are never surrounded by problems.
Blaming the person just creates more problems as the original problem has not gone away and you end up with lots more problems around you.
Alternatively, get out of being a manager. (this applies to the future and all staff who want to be managers as everyone thinks they can be a manager. Not so)
If it’s not in their nature, get them out of Managing otherwise they will do damage to people around them.
If you find you have to keep fixing up problems for someone then they are in the wrong seat.
As the leader, put them in the right seat with the right training and they will be happier and things will be much better for everyone.
Very few people are outright bad. (Although there are a handful).
Most are just in the wrong seat. In the right seat, they are great.
Grinders should stay at grinding. Minders should stay at managing and not grinding. Finders should stay in their lane.
Keep everyone in their lane and bring complementary skills together working as a team and watch the leverage created like the synergistic magic of music in harmony.
1. Grab a free copy of our book – Accountants 20-Hour Workweek
4. Work with the Wize Guys privately
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