What is the role of the owner of a small business? Are they supposed to lead by example or control their resources?

I was faced by this question on a few occasions just recently when meeting clients in the Jerusalem area. They were looking to me, their business coach and mentor, for some motivating words.

The situations varied.

• In one case, one partner was keen for the other to control overall operation, especially on the manufacturing side. However, there was a major concern that financial and administrative issues were being ignored.
• Elsewhere, a CEO was so busy trying to put out ‘all the fires’ at once that very little was getting done, especially in terms of developing new clientele.
• I met with a CEO who now proudly possessed complete control of her concern, yet admitted that the workers did not trust her. The value of that control is….?

And so the list goes on.

In some of the cases, I offered a different approach. I always like to recall that in the best case scenario, we can only control two things – what comes out of our mouths and how we move our limbs. Beyond that we can try to ‘manage’ factors and instances that are shot at us from a multitude of random directions.

As for leadership, Everette Taylor summed it so effectively in a recent interview. When asked if he felt that failure had been close, as he had set up his business, he responded:

There was a point when I was trying to do too much and it started to affect my work. I started losing contracts with a few companies that I highly valued. I had stretched myself thin and some of my best clients were unhappy. I had to take a step back, humble myself, and ask for help………….It was an extremely valuable lesson to learn that as a leader, you have to be able to trust people. You can’t do everything yourself.

What I feel that Everette is saying is that he learnt how to become a manager, exploiting his meager resources effectively. That in turn enabled him to become a leader in a much larger set up.