As a leader are you working on your business or in your business?

Too often I see leaders working too much in the business and not paying enough attention working on the business.  For some working in the business is the only way they see their value, as working in the business drives revenue.

To be clear, working in the business means you are producing goods or services that create revenue.  In my engineering world, that means working on projects.  Using my technical skills to drive revenue.  Typically, my job before I got promoted to a leadership role.

Working on the business means I am focused on driving short-term and long-term initiatives to grow the business.  My primary focus is taking care of the business.  Keeping an eye on the health of the business.

What are you doing?  Are you on it or in it?

It’s okay to work on and in depending upon the size of your group, organization or business.  Working on the business may not be a full-time job.  You can use some free time to work in the business to stay connected.  However, if you lose focus on your primary role as a leader, you might wind up missing some important things about how your business is behaving, and the business can suffer.  As a leader I believe your primary role is to work on the business.  It’s your job to make sure the company thrives.

Often, I see people who get promoted take too long to figure out this concept.  They continue to do their old role while trying to figure out their new role.  They get so consumed by both the old tasks and the new ones that they get overloaded.  They lose sight that they have a new job and forget to take care of the business since they become too busy still working in the business.  They think they need to do both jobs, whereas they got promoted to do a new job.

It was made clear to me early on that your job as a leader is to lead.  If you stay busy working inside the business, when people need your leadership you can’t tell them you are too busy because you are working inside.  You forget that your job is to lead and working in the business is just filling some spare time until your team needs you.  Once that was explained to me, it made perfect sense.  I changed jobs but still work for the same company.  Why would I assume that I still needed to do the same stuff as before?  And the more I work in the business instead of on, the more I am saying with my actions that I don’t want to be a leader of the company.

I send entirely the wrong message to those that took a chance on promoting me.

I also see instances in my professional services world where a group of people spin off and create a new company.  They pick up work and begin to grow the company by adding staff to do the work.  They are the owners and principals.  They bring work in and they do the work and as they grow they bring more people in to do some of the work they bring in.  But the owners and principals are still the ones bringing in the work.  The sellers.  They may add a new principal or owner to the group, but the business platform is the seller-doer mentality.  You sell the work and do the work.  This is a very common model in the professional services industry and it works quite well for many.

Unfortunately, this model is not very scalable or sustainable.  There is usually no one looking after the business when needed and the years pass by and no value is created.  It’s just a job where everyone works.  Likely all the profits are distributed each year, so there are no retained earnings or equity in the company.  The original owners have created nothing to sell, to either outside investors or internal employees.  Since they are the assets, when they leave the assets also leave.  That model is not an attractive sales pitch to potential buyers or investors.

I believe if you want to be an effective leader and want to really build a company, you need to have people that work in the business while the leaders focus working on the business.  Like a good friend of mine used to say, I already have enough hobbies.  If we want this to be a successful business, we need to run it like a business.

“In it to win it” is not always the right approach when it comes to running a business.

“On it to win it” works almost every time. 

If you are willing to devote more time to working on the business, you may be onto something here.

 

Allyn Vaughn

 

Photo by Mike Kononov on Unsplash