Things We’ve Learned in 30 Years..
Not everyone appreciates a” know-it-all”, except maybe your own kids. when they’re pre- teens. But business owners and departmental managers seem to be expected to be able to come up with answers and solutions-often instantly-and that’s quite a burden to take.
It’s not just your employees and direct reports who expect this, but also senior leadership, shareholders and customers get into the act, and in an age where information is freely available at a click of a keyboard. once, there would be a mentor or employee whose vast breadth of knowledge, and grounded wisdom would provide enough information, but many of these have retired, moved on or just decided that the modern pace of technological change was just too rapid.
Now, leaders are left having to select a specialist from an array of different options, or fine with it.
With the onus now firmly on the end user to decide what solution they want, before even finding out the root cause, leaders are now reluctant to ask for help, for three reasons:
- They feel they should be able to deal with it themselves or they’ll feel stupid.
- They can’t articulate the problem well enough.
- They don’t know who to turn to.
In our 30 years, we’ve had countless occasions where a client has asked us to provide a service for a specific project, only for us to find a number of inefficiencies, methods and practices that that client just assumed was the way it always had to be.
Sometimes it’s been long-established businesses who haven’t kept track of new developments that could benefit them.
Sometimes it’s been young, start-up businesses who are almost fumbling around because they don’t have anyone on-board with pragmatic and practical experience to help them along.
In all cases, people are reluctant to ask, and these dialogues have been opened by a simple question about their practices.
There’s no shame in recognising that you can’t do it all or you don’t know everything.
There’s no loss of leadership in asking for help, if anything, it strengthens the bonds.
Perhaps the terminology of” admitting” or “conceding” you need help should be replaced by terms less associated with failure such as” agree”. “acknowledge”, “determine” and” calculate”.
Meanwhile, for anyone who concludes that they require some help in improving industrial and operational processes to relieve the pressure on their time, then just ask!!
Get in touch today to find out more about how we can help you move your business forward and take that pressure off you.
We have shovels!
Peter