(Note: In Spring 2006 I worked closely with two companies preparing for Initial Public Offerings. This transcript is from a curated series of late-night sessions I recorded to train the corporate marketing and sales teams. In these private trainings I answered their specific questions about the strategies and tactics (and art) of establishing your branding and positioning as unique and special, to give you the edge in a crowded marketplace. These have never been shared publicly before now, and even though the recording quality is poor there are some golden nuggets of information in each that will expand your understanding of these key topics and give your business the edge as well.)
A lot is made out of delegating tasks. Good managers are supposed to be good delegators. People who are good leaders are good delegators. They don’t try to do everything, they find good people, and they let those people do the things that those people do best. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that.
The problem is that leaders and managers, especially entrepreneurs, are also visionaries. They have a vision, they have goals, they have direction, they have concepts, they have their 40,000 foot view of how their business and their world is going to work. And just because they have somebody competent to do the tasks at hand doesn’t mean that that person has the ability or that person gets the vision of what it’s all about, and how their piece fits into it.
There’s a major, major change, a major paradigm shift, when somebody gets it, and understands what all of it’s for, and there’s an enthusiasm that takes place. And they can make decisions and show initiative in areas that they never would before. All because they have a vision, and they understand what it is they’re trying to accomplish, they get it. And they will help take the business places that it would never go otherwise.
In other words, they start synergistically bringing added value to the business. Not to say that somebody who’s very good at doing tasks doesn’t bring value. But the value that somebody that is good at tasks can bring, generally, it’s going to be the ability to get things done. And free up the time of the leader. The person who gets vision adds to the vision, adds to it, and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.
So this is the challenge for a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, is to you cannot delegate vision, you can’t tell people, here’s our vision, here’s our vision statement. This is what we do. People have to get it, and it has to be conveyed to them in ways that they understand. And this takes time, it’s an investment. And, and there’s trust involved, because people who want to get a job, are gonna say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it, that’s great! I want to be part of that!” But that doesn’t mean that they get it.
That simply means that they can get excited about the bigness of a vision. But that doesn’t mean that they share the vision, that they get that vision.
So the trick, and I believe this to be the trick that is more important for any business leader or entrepreneur: the secret is not just in delegating, but in learning to find people who can, who can receive and get the vision of where they want to be and where they want to go. And can convey that vision to those people.
Because once they do that, then they are no longer you know, the lone wolf. They’re no longer Humphrey Bogart dragging the ship through the mud, as he did in African Queen. Now they have an engine behind them that’s making their whole life, their whole load easier. And that engine is people who get the vision and are part of that vision as a result.
