Specialisation and dedication is highly productive but it can also be boring for staff. Feeling stuck in a job without hope of enhancing your career or improving future employment prospects is demotivating for employees. At the same time, allowing an individual to dominate a job puts the firm at risk if the person suddenly leaves or is away ill.
What I found over many years of employing staff is that they welcomed the opportunity to learn new skills, participate in new activities and educate themselves to improve their prospects. Instead of losing staff, I ended up retaining them longer than the average in the industry.
When the business went though difficult times, instead of staff leaving to find better security, they were prepared to stay because their wider range of skills and better education made them recognise they were highly employable and didn’t need to worry about getting a job if they were suddenly made redundant.
The cross-training and education opportunities also made them appreciate their current position and made them more interesting and contented staff.
One of the major contributors to high growth is the principle of scalability. Higher scalability or replication occurs when products are standardised, simplified and packaged so that a larger number of people can sell, install and use them.
The problem with knowledge in peoples’ heads it that it is very difficult to scale, thus it severely limits the growth of the firm. In order to grow, a lot of people have to be recruited and then trained on the knowledge.
If, however, that knowledge can be embedded into a product, the ability to more quickly deploy it increases dramatically.
The manner of productising can vary but in essence it means taking knowledge and putting it into a form which can be deployed more quickly in a standardised form.
That might mean a documented process, a software product such as a diagnostic or a tangible product such as a control system.
Once productised, the product is standardised so that training is easier and more routine. Less knowledgeable people can be used for its deployment and standard methods can be utilised in the selling process. Rapid growth depends on the ability to scale. Without productising the knowledge, growth is inhibited.
There will be times when you have to make tough decisions and there will be times when there is nothing to guide you but your personal values. The nature of ethics suggests that, when the going gets hard and you have to make the tough decision, can you live with your decision?
Whenever you compromise your basic beliefs, you have to live with the consequences and the nagging thought that, just maybe, there was another decision you should have made.
A great test of the right decision is whether you can stand up in a public forum and justify your decision. We can only do that if we have strong fundamental beliefs which we stick to. The question of what is right is often different for each of us.
It comes from our upbringing, our parents, schooling and religious and cultural beliefs. This is why different people will make a different decision given the same set of facts.
What is important is that you know what you would do and others around you share those ethical beliefs so that you stand together in the face of a difficult decision.
When you compromise those beliefs, you start to undermine your moral authority but also your own self-belief in what you are doing. Stick to your beliefs.
In any business it is very easy for individuals and entire departments to become isolated and detached from the rest often with their own agenda.
When this happens, the fabric of the business is rendered in pieces and the chances of a coordinated response to an opportunity or problem severely inhibited.
We need to think of the business like an automobile where every part has a function to play and where the whole is much better operationally than the parts. We need to work to ensure that everyone is part of the team and not just an onlooker.
The role of the entrepreneur is both leader and visionary. They need to create an environment where everyone looks forward to the rewards which come from their combined success.
The reward for success can be as simple as achieving industry recognition or having done something outstanding.
But without something which pulls everyone together around a common purpose, it is very easy for individuals and departments to focus on their own goals, often at the expense of others.
At the end of the day a business is not a democracy and someone has to be the boss and make the hard decisions. You can’t have a situation where the employees don’t know who has the last say or where several people say they are in charge. When they disagree you have a dysfunctional business.
Even if you start the business with several others, each with an equal share, the business will only operate effectively if one person is given the task of leader.
There are simply too many times when there is no right answer and someone has to make a judgement call in order for the business to have some sense of direction.
Pick the person who people respect most for their wisdom, leadership and vision and make it work.
Tom McKaskill is a successful global serial entrepreneur, educator and author who is a world acknowledged authority on exit strategies and the former Richard Pratt Professor of Entrepreneurship, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.
You can find his books on entrepreneur secrets on Amazon Kindle’s store.
