Management:
Always Difficult, And Always Necessary

Many small business owners are less than great as managers.

In many cases, they had a great idea for a product or service that they ran with, learning along the way all the millions of details about workman’s compensation or city codes, federal regulation, or the latest scientific and technical advances in their field. Management was just something they’d figure out along the way.

There is nothing easy, or simple, about management. It’s not only complicated, but it’s hard to find solid ground. What works in one situation often fails in another.

Here are a few suggestions that might help:

One of the best involves leadership, the art of inspiring, motivating and directing other humans. Start by throwing out ideas you get from movies and television. Instead, consider a leadership program in your area. Although the time demands can be significant for a good one, they can make a significant difference for participants in their professional and personal lives.

Be ready for some surprises. These programs often involve things like “personal assessment” and “peer review.” Basically, you’re led on what can be an eye-opening evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses. Then you delve into leadership.

A simple but effective bit of advice is to avoid trying to manage from the bubble of your office. It’s easy to fall into this; you certainly have enough paperwork to keep you there all day, every day. But walking around your business, observing and interacting, may be one of the most important things you do – and it’s all too easy to forget that.

Another overlooked area of management involves communications. With so many electronic interruptions—phone messages, email and more—it’s easy to fall into one of two extremes: allowing these to dictate your schedule or failing to respond adequately.

There very definitely are times when you should turn off the phone and email to focus on a project, especially projects that require a high level of concentration. Multi-tasking is overrated. Brain science says we never truly multi-task; we simply jump back and forth with some loss during transition. Some people are better at this than others, but trying to juggle too many issues simultaneously is likely to result in none being done really well and increased stress for you.

A better strategy might be is budget periods during the day for separate duties. Perhaps you can set aside 30-minute blocks to check email and phone messages, or five minutes every hour. The exact quantity and mix of time will depend on you and your business but try this or a similar strategy.

As a small business owner, you probably started by knowing how to perform every job in your business, or at least most of them. You often had no choice. But in today’s technical and specialized world, that’s not possible and as far as growing your business, you must delegate. Depending on the size of your business, that can be difficult, and we have no easy suggestion other than taking time to analyze this in terms of how successful your current strategy is and how you might improve it.

Finally, many management guides suggest leading by example. This can be especially important in some HR-related issues, but it’s a major factor in most people-to-people relationships. Gossip is a good example. You want to eliminate office gossip as it’s almost never good, whether in an actual office, at a construction site or on the plant floor. So, too, is emphasizing behavior like respect, professional attire and hard work. It can be very hard, but the best way to ensure behavior like that is to practice not preach.