01.
Face Reality

Facing Reality as Prerequisite to Change

"Structures of which we are unaware hold us prisoner. Once we can see them and name them, they no longer have the same hold on us."

The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

By accepting things as the way they are, not the way you want them to be, you give yourself the best chance of mastering your destiny. That sounds hyperbolic but it's really that simple. Give yourself permission to admit:

• Your business is more fragile than you think
• You are the bottleneck, not the solution
• Your loyalty to senior people is actually an expensive way to alleviate fear
• You're one client loss from catastrophe
• You don't know how to manage people (nobody taught you)
• The exhaustion is structural, not temporary
• Your current trajectory doesn't look like success

Your business is more fragile than you think

It's easy not to question how we overcome difficult times and to pin our hopes on optimism instead. When all else fails us we're quick to close our eyes and hope for a win despite the odds. 'Hope is not a system' is true but it's also harsh and not overly helpful. I want you to observe the fragility of your business as a mark of respect both to all those who bravely attempted and failed to get their shingle to stick, and to the sacrifices you've made to help your survive. Investing everything you have to get this thing off the ground, then working long hours without certainty any of it will pay off, not to mention taking minimum wage to make payroll after promising leads evaporate. No business is easy. Every business needs to create equity for its owners, a high-stakes situation that, before anything else, deserves respect and acknowledgment.

You are the bottleneck, not the solution

Unlikely as it may be, it's possible you started your business to be popular and always have an easy source of attention. Even if that's true (I hope not), you will always be in the way of what makes a great team: cooperation. Unless you truly are a company of one, you're going to need a group of people to communicate, organize, and deliver good work at a reasonable pace. No single player is more important than the whole, and just because you own the equity of the company doesn't mean you get to monopolize the oxygen in any room.

Recognizing that you play a role, even if it's CEO, is the crucial mindset change that your employees need. They will naturally wait to feel safe before taking chances, and it's your responsponsibility to make clear that ideas eminating from your mind are no better simply because your name is on the building.

Your business needs growth and to grow overall each occupant in your roster needs to constantly grow their capabilities. The best way to encourage growth in people is to encourage their comfort, confidence, and ambition. Their comfort — their sense of belonging — comes first, and there's no greater way to stifle that than by never asking questions, taking credit (for successess), and being generous with blame (for failures).

By acknowledging that you are fallible, that you need their help to succeed, and that they will outshine you in innumerable ways, you will create the single biggest market advantage in any category: a super team that will run through brick walls to achieve your goals.

Your loyalty to senior people is just an expensive way to alleviate fear

Usually 'tenured' employees on your team are children you didn't give birth to. You feel personally responsible for them because your shared time in the trenches — it gives you an identity you feel you cannot shake. You're the parent and they're the kid you taught to ride a bike in the early days. And besides, isn't teaching a new kid everything you know just a drag? You already did that!

I say this with nothing but love, but your employees are not your family (nor are you their parent) and neither of you owe your futures to each other. 'Loyalty' as a business concept is a coercive tool for control, usually reached for when one party is exploiting another, desperate for things not to change. There was a time when people felt loyal to corporations but that era is gone.

Even if you're less sentimental and see your seniors as the ones responsible for keeping your sanity intact, you face the inevitable expectation that their salary increases consistently regardless of their (or the company's) performance. There is a cheaper and less frustrating way to operate. By prioritizing your people's careers and insisting on their meeting your standard — you need to be a learning company — you give yourself the best chance of relying not on a few senior keyholders, but an ecosystem that normalizes a talent escalation. Chances are, you've already done this, but stopped after a single go around. You probably hired an intern in the early days who became very important to you — you gave them the keys to the office — trusting them to represent your brand. And once they learned the ins and outs you settled on them as a fixture. Few professionals are naturally good teachers, but it's a skill you can acquire by weaving it into the fabric of your company. Declaring your company a learning company gives you an unfair advantage at both attarcting younger lower-level talent that you should not be able to afford, and at breaking the habit — the need — of deferring to the owner-operator as the thinking role in the company. By teaching people how to think, you innoculate them against disowning their work (people without a stake in deciding what happens rarely identify with the decided course of action) and against short-circuiting their decision-making capabilities to the highest paid person in the room. It's natural to fear screwing up when your reputation is on the line; you give yourself the best chance of still having a reputation to defend a decade from now if you run a company that develops people, not just relying on senior professionals whose salaries are higher than their value.

You're one client loss from catastrophe

Don't think too literally here, but in some cases a gorilla client — one who dominates your restless nights — can go ape and wreck you. Instead of treating your best-paying client as you're most important client, what if you treated all clients with the same care and dedication? That would communicate to your team that you are the catch in this relationship. We don't need to be fearful of a client who can switch our lights off if we divorce ourselves from allowing a client to dominate not just our bank account but our peace of mind. It's usually true that the more power we cede in a relationship with a client, the less that client will see us as meaningfully differentiated to our competitors; ironically, this leaves us vulnerable to replacement.

A mental shift to acknowledge the vulnerability of our need for revenue is enough to respect who keeps our bread buttered, and by never forgetting that we are in service of our clients we are free to put ourselves first. To understand that our professional priority is first to ourselves is to pay the greatest respect to the people who fund our livelihood.

You can lose any client on any given day. There's one huge factor in your control to avoid this loss: insisting on a learning company that filters out those who cannot keep pace with the high standards you set daily.

You don't know how to manage people (nobody taught you)

You can be a good employer and a bad manager. Maybe you learned, by trial and error, to be a functional manager by making early mistakes that taught you what not to do. You read a few books and some soundbytes from peers stuck, helping form a system of sorts that got you to today. It's fine (preferable) to admit that you don't know how to manage well. You needed people's help and by hiring the "best" people you could find — they worked at some impressive companies! — you gave yourself the best chance of not needing to manage them. And besides, you're a self-starter, someone who came up in an environment where figuring things out (without anyone's help) was prized by your managers. The same people who find changing technology exciting are usually the ones frustrated by new kinds of people appearing en masse. We can find easy ways to generalize groups of people, but one thing for sure is that there will continue to be gaps between generational waves frustrated by their differences. I'll give you the bad news first.

It's your job as the elder generation to adapt to each new workforce. Younger people have neither the context (years) nor the skill to lead your relationship, nor to fathom what it is you want from them. Ask them if they know what a floppy disc is; what dial-up is; what a mini-disc is; it's not their fault they're new and that their newness frustrates you. It's your job to give them the context they need to do a good job. The good (great) news is that you've been meaning to document your core processes for years, and now you have this handy guide to cut through the noise and get down to it.

Effective management is something you can learn. It includes:

• Institutional transparency. Give your people a radar of the company's performance and tell them their role in making things better.
• Making people feel good. You spent a lot of time and energy selecting each person to join the team. Now they're here, your role is to make them feel ten feet tall. Tell them what you admire about them vociferously and often and watch them thrive.
• Defining the standard. People showing up to work in creased shirts drives you nuts: tell them! Avoiding following standard processes: tell them! Selling a client something overkill: tell them! Your standard is specific to your company and comes in infinite flavors so it's not worth prescribing here. Put differently, if the only reason an employee can be exited is through misconduct, you need a much higher standard.
• Putting them first. Describe where this job sits in the story of their career and how important they are in the journey of your company. Small businesses are good because they're weird. Your employees value the opportunity to learn quickly with real experience with live projects. By centering them in your conversations you heighten their sense of worth and embed purpose in their days that a larger salary (and no seat at the table) cannot match.
• Top-down management in a small group is a bad idea. Just as it's not your job to motivate your people — they need to find their own ways to enjoy their work — it's not your job to monitor their performance. When you communicate your expectations and your standard, it's truly up to each player to make sure they're committed to delivering their best effort. It's easy to think of management as an overbearing parent constantly reminding their kids of their homework responsibilites, choosing their meals on their behalf, and sheltering them from any possible harm. The first obligation for each person on your team is not to you (their employer), it's to themselves and their own professional standards. Your job is to deliver timely, specific, helpful feedback as soon as you have it, and to pattern match over time if they offer reluctance to change. Don't be the "boss," be the person they want to impress.

Being a good manager is a lofty and ongoing pursuit, but trying to improve goes a long way with your people.

The exhaustion is structural, not temporary

Your exhaustion is an account of sweat equity you never wanted, and hard-earned.

"All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they are now getting"

— Tom Northup

Perhaps employees drive you nuts. Maybe clients are maddening. If you're unlucky it's both. Facing reality means realizing you're in a bad place, that you took each step to that place with open eyes and best intentions. It will not just go away. There have been better moments and eras in your company where things have been easier, but the challenges dogging you are the norm and will revert and persist eventually.

Your current trajectory doesn't look like success

My vision for you is for more of what you deserve and less of what you tolerate. Small businesses with owners who underpay themselves, overwork their roles, forced to chase revenue producing generalist work, who have no equity and no chance of selling their business when the time is right; those people deserve better than they get. You deserve more than what you expect will be the product of your career.

You cannot close the gap between your current reality and the vision for your business until you face the reality of your situation. Anything is possible once you face reality. But before you read on you should want to embrace accepting things as they are. Everything that follows will benefit from your honesty.