Why are you managing your business?

This blog talks about business management. Indeed my whole business is about the craft of business management. 

And if the business is the idea, management is what turns the idea into action. 

But what are you managing, exactly? How do you manage an “idea” into a “reality”?

The best way to answer this question is to follow the progression of what you could manage. 

Managing people

Too may business focus only on managing people. 

Managing people means hiring some staff and telling them to “do things”. 

Telling people to do things, means giving instructions such as “make 20 phone calls”, or “always be on time”, or “train clients on this product”. 

Managing people doesn’t account for why they are doing the things, or how, or what to do in any situation that is even slightly out of the norm. 

With this form of management, most of your people can be replaced by machines. 

Managing process

Managing the process means ensuring the people adhere to the established way of working. 

This offers an improvement on managing people, because it allows those people to make some decisions about how and when to do things, so long as they adhere to the standards set by the process. 

The fact is: every business should have a layer of process management because it is essential to collaboration. People can not share knowledge and ideas effectively without some agreement about how, when, and where to share that knowledge. 

Managing success criteria

Managing success criteria means letting your team in on what you want to achieve, and then setting them loose to achieve it. 

When you manage success criteria, you have explained what result you want to see allowing your employees to use their own skills and preferences to get those results. 

This level of management is the one that leaves space for 

• continuous improvement of your business 
• easy adaptation to opportunities or disruption
• ongoing professional development of everyone on your team. 

What are you managing, exactly?

Every business requires some level of all three of these. 

Getting the balance right is the difference between having a business and managing growth. 

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