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You Cannot Complain About a Glass Ceiling When You Haven’t Mastered the Hard-Skills That Break Glass!
A mistake that most small business owners make is doing all the work themselves.
While this is necessary when your company is in the Emerging quadrant of its life cycle, once you “cross the chasm” into the Growth quadrant, and no longer need Traction, you are limiting yourselves to fewer opportunities to expand your business, and costing you thousands of dollars.
OK, go to the “Vocabulary For Success” and look up Operational Management and then Strategic Management, so you understand the difference. You’ll see that Operational Management delivers single digit growth each year, while Strategic Management delivers double-digit growth each year. Big difference.
The mistake that Operational managed companies make is that double digit growth cannot occur if you, the CEO and your key executives, are doing all the operational work yourselves. This leaves little time for unleashing what I call your company’s “creative juggernaut!”
I hear this all the time from small business CEOs: “I have to remain responsible for the decisions that make things happen.” That statement tells me two things: 1) they do not understand the difference between the hard-skills of Responsibility and Accountability; and, 2) they do not manage with metrics. Both are hard-skill competencies of leadership management and are the most important for every leader to master.
What we see in today’s leadership management environment is that few leaders have mastered the hard-skill competencies for being a top-notch executive. In addition, I find that too many leaders are soft-skill experts, but have little knowledge of the skills that create executives and CEOs, the hard-skills. From my perspective, you cannot complain about a glass ceiling when you haven’t mastered the hard-skills that break glass!
Here’s another perfect quote from Sahil Lavingia – founder of Gumroad:
“If you let someone go and they are surprised, you f—-d up.” He is actually talking about the same dilemma that this post is all about: not knowing the hard-skill Axioms of Success for your position.
