By: Mark Phelps, Principal, Synchronous Solutions
Business is a tool, a tool to help life go right. If business is stable, then it can be the one stable place when your life is rocky, right? We take advantage of the fact that people with stable lives can handle a rocky business. But really, we are trying to build a stable business so that people can have rocky lives.
People die, people get sick, life happens, right? And at the bottom of it, do we want a community that can handle and support us when those things happen? If we can help build that vision for what this business is about, then we can say, look, we are going to come together and help you when your life gets rocky. We are not going to let your rocky life rock this business because then we all fail. And this comes back to we’ve got to have people taking ownership, accountability and responsibility.
If they are not getting something done, at some point they become a liability to the business, to themselves. They start tearing apart the trust systems that have been put in place, or let the systems degrade, as it were. In those scenarios, we need them to change. We need them to get their stuff right, or we need them to get out of the way.
And whether they decide to resign because they are not the best fit for the role anymore… That is wonderful. Right? If I am the bottleneck and I recognize that the team’s trying to move forward and they are stuck on me, true ownership is to go, “Maybe I’m the wrong person for the role. Let’s find the right role for me, or let’s figure out how I can get out of the way.”
I think the tough conversations we have with people, we got to move them towards taking ownership, accountability or responsibility. If they go into blame, excuse, denial, that is when we got to have that conversation because now they are actively being a hindrance to what is the mission of our organization. That is not good for them. It is not good for the team. It is not good for the business across the board. So let us talk about that.
Let us bring that out to the surface. And let us be real, where it is like, “I want the best for you. I want the best for the team. And sometimes the best for you and the team is that we give you space to go and do something elsewhere.”
Recognize that becoming an enabler is not the win-win solution forward. It is just like when we are enabling people in our lives, they are an addict and we are giving them access because we feel for them. That is not helpful to them or to us.
That is one of the benefits of the billion- and trillion-dollar companies, right? Those are the stable places and there is a lot of redundancy. What I would encourage is the acknowledgment that until you are there, wherever there is, there is a level of expectation that we need people to bring their all when they show up. And if they can’t, there is a giant ecosystem out there that has been through those roads and they can get there. And we don’t have to be the saviors. Alright?
So yes, I think it is a massive responsibility for us to say, let us fix our systems, let us get our systems right. I love that because it is absolutely correct. Just know where you are at. When times are tight, it’s like oh, we need to take advantage of the structures for that. And we need the right people in the right seats for this season that we are in.
