Should Business Leadership Be Convenient Or Rewarding?

Great Leadership Does Not Come In A Speed Boat

How convenient is moderately successful?  If you own a small business model, not.  To a small business, performing moderate success is a lot like living on the edge of almost failing.  Almost failing is not a convenient place to live.  I know, I repair failing business models.  Nothing is convenient when success is almost always absent.  That is the bone honest truth.

I meet a lot of leaders in business who try to perform their work in a more convenient fashion.  Convenience in performance is actually one of their driven goals.  It is actually planned.  They shoot for it.

Many business leaders work their daily routine looking for ways to do more with less impact.  They are trying to get a lot more done each day and the their measure of a good day is often times achieved by how much work they actually got done.  Many business leaders get caught up measuring sheer volume of task completions well ahead the quality of their lessons learned from the few deeper tasks performed.  Quality of work is often times compromised by feeling better about getting more things done.  This kind of drive promotes the increased search for convenient ways to do their work patterns.

I like convenience.  I have no challenge with it.  It should be pursued.  Every business leader needs to figure out the most convenient methods for doing their daily routines as often as they can perform them.  Convenience is a vital success tool.  I recognize the importance of this ideology.  However, if the quality of the work performed is compromised to get more things done quicker...not good.  Quality work will always exceed in results well ahead of volume completions.  If you are a business leader know this truth.  Learn the art of respecting this truth.  Teach your mental system how to respect, honor and perform better levels of quality work.  Do not get wrapped up trying to do more things that are of lesser quality.  Those types of misunderstandings will hurt your long term performance results.  Those leaders will lose more often.  It is kind of a law of business.  A hidden one.

Business leadership should strongly evaluate how much they perform convenience-type moves at the expense of quality-type moves.  If the business model is struggling a bit, take a deeper look at this simple scenario.  The answers might be resting near the idea that the quality of work performed has become often times compromised by the sheer desire to get a lot more things done.  The business troubles might be circling this simple idea.

If crossing a lot of items off the list of "things to do" in a fast motion is the goal of the business leader, watch out.  If that is the case, some important things are not being handled properly.  Quality work may be something that is being compromised too often.  This is where the old saying, "the hurried-er I go the be-hinder I get" makes its notice.  Double work takes over when the quality of performance is compromised.  Double work is a silent killer to the cost of energy therms a business must endure.  Double work leads to increased labor costs with less successes to generate enough revenue to cover those increased costs.  Long term, that kind of math does not work well.  It can easily chew up company profits.

Be vary leery when the desire for convenience exceeds the desire for performing quality of work.  This kind of driven force is a silent killer to the control of costs a good business leader must deliver.  Sloppy work that centers itself around convenience compromising is sloppy work that will need to be done again.  Sooner or later the extra effort to improve the quality of that convenient work performed will demand to be re-done properly.  That is when it becomes double work.  The business will pay twice to complete what should have taken once.  Two bucks for every dollar spent is not a very convenient way to succeed in business.  It is a silent killer to success.  Slow down, do better work.  Quit chasing the "things to do" list with too much vengeance.

How convenient is double work?

Great Leadership Requires Less Convenience

The health of the work performed by the business leader is a lot more secure when the numbers fall on the profitable side of the equation.  We all know that time is money.  This is even more true if it is the owners time.  Unfortunately, as is often the case, owners believe their time is free!  It is not.  In fact, it is more expensive to spend the owners time than it is to spend the time of any other employee of the model.  The most valuable time chips a business model owns are the time chips that remain on the owners clock.  How that time is spent is critical.  Quality of use for that remaining time should be one of the company's top priorities.

Let's take a simple look at how convenience can kill performance.

I recently deiced to pour some grout around the flat rocks I have installed on a small stone fire pit deck I built.  The rocks installed are flat rocks.  They are installed in hardened cement.  The next step to perform is to grout the gaps between the flat rocks.

To make that job more "convenient" to do I elected to make the grout material very runny, wet.  I also know that mixing up grout to become too wet will compromise the adhesion ability of the cement in the grout.  However, it would be far more convenient for my grout application to be able to pour it in the gaps between the flat rocks like liquid.  This would make the finish work and grout clean up easier to do.  My only challenge will be to see if the grout will set up strong enough to be able to remain adhered to the small gaps between the rocks.  If it works it will save me a lot of time in detail smoothing and grout clean up.

I decided to mix and pour it like liquid instead of like butter, which is what the grout installation recommends.  Guess what?  My plan worked.  The grout in liquid form was a lot easier to apply properly to the gaps between the installed flat stones.  Smoothing the grout and cleaning it up was a cinch, as planned.  How convenient!

It looks great.  I am so pleased.  Now guess what else happened?  After drying, the grout is now failing to remain adhered and blowing away like sand.  It is blowing away and sweeping away because none of the cement was able to remain in the grout material because it was too wet when applied.  How important was convenience?  I will need to remove all of the remaining "sand" which was supposed to be hardened grout.  I will need to re-apply the grout, again, in a hardened form like a better mixed butter.  I will need to perform double work.  How convenient is this stuff?

How many times does a business leader perform this kind of work?  Too many.  All of us are guilty of this error.  We have such a high desire in this competitive world to compete faster as apposed to competing better.  We are inoculated with the idea that doing more is better work.  That just simply is not true.  Unfortunately, we are having a tough time convincing ourselves that more is not better.  Better is better.  Better might not become more convenient, but it produces better results.  Slower is better.  In most cases, slower is more productive.  Double work is not easy to compensate.  It erodes healthy profits.  Sometimes too much desire for more convenience causes double work to begin.  Double work is a costly proposition to support.  It kills the efforts of a struggling business model.

I like how the grout work was applied.  It was convenient.  I like how it looked when it was done.  I just do not like how it performed.  The results were terrible.  The double work was costly to my time chips and the total effort was exhausting to complete.  This is exactly how business leaders get caught up into doing the wrong kinds of things in their business models.  They get infatuated with the idea of convenience.  They get infatuated with the idea of some new clever thinking.  They truly believe they will be able to circumvent the long-way fundamentals by instilling short-cuts to reduce the time required to complete the job with better quality.  Leadership should never become convenient.  It is not a convenient process.

It may take longer to grout it properly.  It may even become more difficult to do.  However, when completed properly the grout job will become more rewarding when it comes out with a better, longer lasting result that provides a more rewarding end.  This is exactly how leadership works.  It takes longer to do.  It is harder to perform properly.  Yet it delivers a more rewarding set of results than if it was processed with added convenience.  Leadership should never be convenient, because it isn't.

Until next time...