Delegation is the single most important skill for a business owner to master - and most business owners (including your clients) won't be very good at it. Here are some reasons you will be given and some suitable responses: My employees will make mistakes.   Of course they will.  That’s how you learned.  Support them so that they don’t make big mistakes I do not have the right staff, they are not up to it.   From experience I suggest that this may be the case, but probably isn’t.  Employees’ performance usually reflects their manager’s capability.  Leaders understand that people live up to (or down to) their leader’s expectations. It is quicker to do it myself.   Well, it might take you an hour to show someone else what takes you five minutes – but if you don’t invest that hour you will still be doing it yourself in one year or ten years It’s cheaper to do it myself.   This is clearly nonsense unless your time is worth le...

Some of your clients may ask about the benefits of appraisals and how to do them.  This shows they understand that developing their business means developing their employees, which is good.  Don't just rush into appraisals though. A client who owned a fast-growing business once said to me that he was concerned that he hadn’t had time to “do all the HR things I should do” for the past couple of years. Two years before, business growth was being hampered by quality and delivery problems. His staff were avoiding answering the phone because they knew it would be an angry customer. Sales, Design and Operations were at loggerheads. The company did have, however, lots of HR stuff going on. Appraisals, reviews, training and so forth ran like clockwork and my client devoted a lot of his time to HR initiatives. We spent a lot of time when I started working with him talking about structure and how to solve the customer service issues. He had an effective project manager (he called him “a...

Do you ever talk to your clients about leadership?  How do they react?  I bet a lot of them don't see themselves as leaders – even though they are. Try explaining that leadership doesn’t mean they have to suddenly become Napoleon or Gandhi, but it might help them to understand what leadership looks like and do the things that leadership requires.  The quality of the leadership will to a large extent decide the success of a business. Google returns over 244 million pages when you search for “leadership books”.  Amazon returns over 60,000 titles.  The subject has been fascinating people for thousands of years.  We all know it when we see it, and recognise when it is absent, but a practical, implementable definition remains elusive. The development of leadership thinking and research over the last few decades can be summarised as: First, people started by examining leadership traits Leaders were born Certain traits recurred, like intelligence, empathy, confide...

As a coach you are likely to have frequent conversations about why employees leave.  These are usually prompted by a long-serving employee leaving or increased difficulty recruiting good people. It used to be popular to hold focus groups with employees to establish what they looked for in an employer.  In  a tough market for finding and retaining staff this may come back into fashion - and why not?.  You should encourage your clients to engage with their staff this way and understand that employing people is a market and you need a unique selling proposition. Where you might start to differ from your clients is in the sort of things they feel will make a difference, like an extra day of holiday or better overtime rates.  Bonus schemes are another favourite. Introducing these fringe benefits seems completely rational but you might want to challenge your clients about a lack of understanding of why people move between organisations. It is rarely for money.  O...

From time to time your clients will hire, at significant expense, a new senior manager. It is not unusual for them to become unhappy with the new hire’s performance quite quickly.  They'll talk to you about it and when you ask them to explain you will find that their view is, in effect, based on what they see and hear and how they feel about what the new hire is spending their time doing.  It is not unusual for nothing more scientific than this to be used at the end of the probation period to make a decision that has serious consequences for both parties. Here are some suggestions if you are faced with this: Ask your client how they have agreed with the new employee what success looks like.  How is it to be measured?  Is this written down as objectives and regulalry reviewed? Ask your client if the employee can control all of these outcomes.  Do they control all the resources required?  Are reporting lines clear?  Is their an agreed job description? As...

As you develop as a business coach you will start to wonder why most business owners grow their business to a certain size and then get stuck whilst a few are able to create scalable businesses that go on to employ many people. Opinions as to the reasons for this will differ from coach to coach but here are my thoughts: Some business owners do not have growth as an objective. They have no external shareholders to satisfy and are focused on their lifestyle. Some business owners would like to grow but do not see the return justifying the effort required. Some business owners have the ambition and drive but do not have the required capabilities, which might include emotional intelligence, self-awareness, credibility in the eyes of their staff, intelligence (or at least the ability to generalise from the specific), creativity, vision, communication, commercial nous, courage – and just being organised. Some business owners have the capabilities but don’t have the tools, such as understandin...

  You will help your clients to put systemisation in place.  You and they will believe that it is working. Managers will have clear targets Regular performance reviews take place Your client listens, questions and coaches  instead of telling managers what to do And yet…one day your client will tell you they are unhappy because their managers are not doing the things that they agreed to do.  “They nod and say yes – but then don’t do what we agreed.” Their immediate reaction is often that it is something to do with incentivisation.  You can explain how motivation works and the benefits and drawbacks of incentivisation schemes.  However, this is not usually the cause of nodding and saying yes. Perhaps your client thinks they need to be more of a disciplinarian.  Whilst it is true that leaders need to be prepared to take firm action on sustained poor performance it is unlikely this will help if all the managers are backsliding. Ask them why they think some...