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In business, our view of succession is not unlike that of royals. An heir apparent is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.
This approach is fraught with difficulties.
First, as regnant monarch, we put off the selection, training and all that, because we’d rather not face our own mortality, and because to do all that takes time out from running the business.
Next, the heir we select may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. They may have other ideas on what to do with their life.
The people we’ve overlooked may resent that, and start to at least detach themselves from the business, or undermine it, or worse decide to fight over it.
Finally, there may not be an obvious heir.
There is a more rational, modern approach.
Built this way, a business more or less runs itself.
It gives you far more options for succession, because anyone who works in it can be your heir, if they want.
Or everyone.
A transition from dictatorship to democracy in a single generation.
That would be a legacy to be really proud of.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
One day, the child in this photograph might expect to inherit her parents’ motorbike.
She couldn’t expect to use it until she’d learned to drive it safely, keep it in good order and register it with the appropriate authorities. If that seems like too much trouble, she might very well sell it, run it into the ground, or simply leave it to rust.
Handing over your business to your employees (or your children for that matter) isn’t enough to ensure that it will thrive afterwards. Transferring ownership transfers power, but not the ability to use that power responsibly.
Of course your people might have that ability already, but if you’re the boss of a 5 or 10 person business, it’s unlikely that you or they know that conclusively.
After the sale is almost too late to find that out. You’re not the boss any more.
So, if you’re planning to go employee-owned, or to pass your business on to your children, make sure they know how to run it before they take ownership.
This takes effort, but not as much as you might think. Like most things, the sooner you start, the better. But you could do it while the legalities of transfer are being worked out, or even include it as part of the transfer process.
The upside is you’ll have something even more worth handing over, and for all the new bosses, the ability to truly cherish it as your legacy.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Here are 10 positive reasons why you might want to disappear from your business:
– You want to spend more time with your family.
– You want to start a family.
– You want to write a book.
– You want to go into politics.
– You want to start another business.
– You want to follow a passion.
– You want to start a charity.
– You want to take a sabbatical.
– You want to retire.
– You want to sell your business.
And here are 3 very positive reasons why you should do it before you need to:
– You want your business to make a bigger impact now. Serve more customers, better, support more people working in it, and make that work more meaningful and fulfilling for them.
– You want your business to become an asset, not a job. The source of your pension, an income for your family, an income stream for your next venture. To sell it for more money.
– You want your business to take on a life of its own. To become your legacy, continuing to make an impact long after you’ve gone.
Bonus:
– You still get to do whatever you want to do.
– You can still enjoy working in your business if you want to.
A modest amount of Discipline when you’re a team of 3 to 5 people, makes all this Daring possible. More quickly than you think.
Ask me how.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
It makes us Hyde when we want to be Jekyll.
It makes us owls when we want to be flowers.
It makes us angry and resentful when we want to please.
It makes us defensive when we want to improve.
It makes us sullen when we want to co-operate.
It makes us passive when we want to be proactive.
It makes us jobsworth’s when we want to take responsibility.
It makes us dot i’s and cross t’s when we want to be making a dent in the world. A dent that matters.
We can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. We spend all day watching it, second-guessing how it feels, how it will react, covering our backs by passing jobs up. It feels like we care more about ‘The Boss’ than we do about our clients.
It’s everything we hate about being employees – the workflows, the time-sheets, the endless check-ins, the inability to fix things we know are wrong, never getting to see the big picture – everything that gets in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stops us focussing on what really matters – the client.
No wonder we can’t wait to get away of an evening.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
We know exactly who it is. And we don’t care who knows it.
It’s not a monster.
It’s just a gap.
When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
If you’re lucky, you start your business with someone else, or maybe even as a trio.
Two heads, three heads are better than one.
Being a co-Boss helps you share the hard work of getting going, gives you a sounding board for ideas, and brings additional valuable resources to the business – whether that’s talents, time or even money.
But good things do come to an end, often perfectly amicably. People grow, their circumstances change, their talents call them to new things.
That’s fine, if people need to move on, they need to move on.
The problem lies with what they take with them, locked inside their heads, no longer accessible to the business they’ve left.
Perhaps they were the operations person, who just made everything work. Perhaps they were the sales wizard, effortlessly charming clients aboard. Or the finance pilot, keeping a firm hand on the money tiller. Or perhaps they were the ideas person, driving the forward movement of the business.
Obviously, if you’d known this was going to happen, you’d have found a way to pull all that accumulated know-how out of their heads before they went. But if not, how do you reconstruct that missing part?
The good news is that although what your co-Boss knew is still inside their head, it’s actually also inside the heads of everyone else in the business, and, crucially, inside the heads of your clients.
It may not be written down, but it is there, and can be re-constructed into an explicit Promise of Value, along with the Customer Experience Score that follows from that, turning buried knowledge into a practical, usable, evolvable asset.
Only, once you’ve dug it up, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with everyone in the business. Then share the work of living it so everyone can become your co-Boss.
Because many heads are always better than one.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
Even if a Boss has already disappeared.
