Good Business, Bad Dog

Working in an environment filled with clutter, stress and dis-functionalism can become an unhealthy thing.  Corners of work responsibilities are left incomplete, done gets undone and routine work constantly becomes duplicated.  It is a very costly affair.  Hard earned revenues slip away magically and there appears to be a vacuum siphoning off the narrow margins of profit.  It is a bad dog day when the staff and their leader collide on occasion in an environment designed to manage through this kind of business mold.  Good business models can easily get caught up in a very disorganized fashion.  Personal collisions become routine.  I have witnessed many business models run their business race with strides that represent this kind of running.  They end up as a good business, bad dog affair.

You may be the leader of one of those unorganized business models.  You may be the cause of the stressful environment.  Shame on you.  Grow up and get out of the way.  Get some help.

Leaders are the backbone to business success.  Leaders are also the backbone to business failure.  If your model is failing, guess what?  I hope you are not the one that is in the way.  If you are the one that is in the way, change what you are doing or get out of the way.  Be courageous enough to admit it to yourself and begin becoming a better leader.  Find someone in your model that is willing to lead better and delegate to them the key functions you are messing up.  Get your hands off the wheel and find a different driver.  You have become so involved with yourself you are forgetting about the needs of your business model.  Your model is number one, not you, not your ideas, not your philosophies nor your personal gains.  None of them are yours.  They all belong to your business model.  Get over it and allow your business model to do what it is supposed to do.

'Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead' is a rotten concept.  It suggests that you will wreck the ship at any cost.  A lot of business owners and their business leaders do exactly that.  They get hair brain ideas and forge them forward without good consciousness and in the push to do what should not be done they destroy perfectly good business results.  They, too, will easily blame the economy.  It is such a lame process to witness.  I see this kind of poor leadership a lot.  It is disturbing how evident it is to see by the staff and patrons of the business model yet how blind it is to the leader who does not recognize its presence.  Denial is a very sick and disturbing process.  Certainly there are not enough mirrors in the halls of leadership.  The security cameras may actually be aimed in the wrong direction.

If you are one of those leaders who is working harder on protecting what you are doing, you are one of those leaders who is disturbed in performing what you should be doing.  In your heart you know this is true.  I am here to help you find your way out of this mess and begin turning your career around and so you can perform more successfully.  I have done what you are doing and I am here to tell you it will only work to serve you miserably.  We need to change how we approach our leadership.  Our first step is to forget about the business model for a little while and begin the work on improving our leadership skills.  The business will do exactly what we have been forcing it to do.  The staff will keep it alive.  We can get out of the way for a little while and allow the staff to fill in where they will.  Trust me, they will fill in just fine.

The second step we need to do is get a great piece of literature on leadership to read.  I do not recommend that you ignore this step.  If you skip this step you have already given up.  You have not even started and you are throwing in the towel.  You are more disturbed than you are willing to admit.  Your business future is truly at risk.  Maybe you are done with it.  Maybe you are so tired of it that you want out anyway.  Then get out.  When your will is done fighting, you are cooked.  Get out of the oven.  You are just burning everyone else in the process of sticking around.  This is not about you.  You have chosen your fate and you need to move on.  Get out of the way.  You have become the bad dog.  Get out of their yard.


The second step is to get a good book.  I recommend an old classic.  It is not an easy read, however.  In fact, it might be one of the most difficult books to start and more difficult to finish than anything you have ever read before.  You also may need to find it on E-Bay or Amazon.  I am not sure it is in print anymore.  Check it out.

The book we need to read is "The Law of Success" by Napoleon Hill.  It is a big book with a lot of pages and a lot of words.  If you are a slow reader, it will take us longer than others who read faster.  Time is not an issue.  We are more interested in the material.  Good leadership development is not a race.  This second step is vital if we plan on correcting our current leadership ills.  We have holes we need to repair.  We cannot successfully repair them without getting some very good advice.  We will need to put in some new information in order for us to perform better actions.  Our stock of knowledge is too limited to allow us the right kind of thinking we need to be performing in order to become a better success in business.  We need some new bad dog training.

The third step on our list of repairs is to work on allowing our staff to become more involved in the model of success.  We need to let go of the control lines here and there in order to allow them the right, the ability, the freedom and the space to perform what they know are the right kinds of things that need to be done.  We need to delegate more of the work plan to the staff.  We need not only to learn how to delegate, but we also need to get out of the way when we give them the work.  We need to allow them to make mistakes.  We need to tolerate more mistakes.  This is exactly how they will learn.  Quit worrying about how they may take over.  They will.  That is a good thing.  Your stress levels will be reduced greatly!  That, too, is a good thing.

If you are reading well in the book I suggested you will become a better teacher.  A good teacher will always have good students.  A good teacher is also one of the best students.  You need to learn how to become a better student.  Instead of showing off what you know, teach others how to do what you do well.  Learn how to stay informed and make sure your stock of knowledge is always on the growing path.  Leaders are readers.  Readers are leaders.  Get the book and read it.

Self help books have a wonderful tendency to make us want to throw them across the room.  We read a point we do not like and it makes us mad.  We get mad because the truth hurts us.  Throwing the book will not help.  Changing our thoughts, beliefs and approach will help us.  Go ahead anyway, start doing stuff you do not know or understand.  It will eventually show up on your bottom line improvements.  Your business success will repair itself when you repair yourself.  It is amazing how that happens.

A good business, bad dog arrangement will not last for very long.  Get started today on the correction process.  Order the book.  When it comes in, set a regular time aside like a routine schedule and begin to use that time to read a few pages.  Don't get in a hurry.  Better yet, get a routine schedule down pat so you can routinely read the few pages you need to read each and every day.  Do not skip a day!  Read something every single day.  Force yourself to create this discipline.  Respect who you are, what you are trying to do and how you plan to protect where you want to go.  Get serious about it.  Grow up.

Now...wasn't this one fun?!

Until next time...