It’s A Management Issue
No matter if it is a speed bump or a pothole, when things go wrong in a business, it is always a management issue. Even if they didn’t cause the event, the person at the top has to take responsibility for it. It is even more complicated for a small business owner because the opportunities for enhancing your crisis management skills are endless.
Many books have been written, seminars are given and training programs attended on handling a disaster or a problem customer. However, little educational attention is paid to the day to day relentless parade of little time takers. The art of delegation is a time honored response to handling the corrective action strategy. But if you don’t have someone to delegate too, it just gets added to the list of things that need to be done immediately.
In most cases, it is not a matter of not knowing what to do, it is just having the time to do it the way you would like or the way it should get done to fix the real problem. The truth is that we live in a world of sound bite information and quick fix solutions. We learn time management for scheduling tasks, but little attention is paid to managing management downtime. We do personal downtime, but we are taught good leaders are focused and driven to succeed. Let’s face it; we are hard wired to be doers. What if the problem is beyond our ability to control and all our doing pushes us farther under water?
In most cases, during one my early visits with a business owner in financial stress, we often address the feeling of being just being worn out; even beat down, by a growing list of unaddressed problems. There are just not enough Band-Aids in the cabinet to address all the wounds. Initially, the solution may be as simple as providing the ladder for the leader to climb above the fray. Sometimes, it is just to see that they are not alone and that the path to recovery has already been traveled by many others. The key sighting is this, I have yet to discover a problem that someone else hasn’t addressed, resolved and gladly wrote or talked about how they did it.
It has been my experience that when a business leader has been able to accomplish the detailed self-assessment, re-build their own leadership process and re-boot their internal energy source, a struggling business finds its way to recovery. Regardless of the causes for failure or the steps to success, it is always a management issue. The SEWN program exists to help owners and business leaders deal with all the issues that create business stress. Allow us to help you with the time tested tools to create a better path to success for your organization.
Contact Gregory Olson, Director, SEWNSE Region, 215-458-7580, sewnse@steelvalley.org, to learn more www.steelvalley.org.