overcoming the fear of growing your team

We've designed and facilitated many short HR programs for small business owners. Before each program begins, we ask owners what they're wanting from attending, and we're told:

• I want to grow my business but I don't have a clear idea how;
• I'm told to engage my team in the business but don't know how;
• I'm worried about the costs of employing, and the risks if things go wrong;
• We've given everything to our team to make them happy but nothing seems to improve for the business;
• The more people I employ, the more stressed I become;
• We don't do performance reviews because they're so uncomfortable and we'd like to know a better way; or
• I'm scared about employing people because if they're not suitable, I don't know how to get them out of my business.

We get it. These issues are raw and real.

The idea of growing a business should be inspiring, but these issues dampen your enthusiasm and get in the way of your inspiration.

We know that employing people is expensive and recruiting is time consuming. Compliance can be scary. There can be a a feeling of loss of control. It is often difficult, and frustrating, to get the commitment from people that brings accountability and ownership thinking.

For some business owners, the reaction to the frustration has been to tighten 'management control'. They take an adversarial approach, excessively focus on compliance, and use money as an incentive to performance. Far from relieving the stress and frustration, this adds to it, because there is nothing inspiring about conflict or forcing compliance.

Some business chambers even seem to encourage that broken HR model, with their adversarial approach based on 'them and us'.

Change Agents - here's a new mission.

It's time for a new approach, coming from a belief that everyone is seeking, and deserves, the feeling of satisfaction that comes from inspired contribution. An approach from the belief that everyone has the right, and innate capability, to create the extraordinary. So, how can we deliver it?

LEARNING FROM A CRISIS SITUATION

We often see the best of people's behaviour when there has been a crisis. One such situation was in January 2011 when there was severe flooding in Queensland, including the Brisbane CBD.

Three days after the floods had moved through Brisbane, the government called for 6,000 volunteers to assist with cleaning up. Actually, the response was that 80,000 people came out to volunteer in the worst affected areas of Brisbane.  

Think about the work they volunteered to do. The stench of sewage, the hard labour of shovelling and cleaning. Dealing with the emotions of those who had lost so much. They probably never worked harder in any job, but when they went home exhausted at the end of the day, they would have felt such an enormous feeling of satisfaction from their contribution.

Nobody told them to do it, nobody paid them, and nobody told them how to do things once they were there.

In this crisis, there was the perfect example of the natural human desire to:

• Have a strong reason or cause, or a Why;
• Feel something bigger than themselves, or a part of a community;
• Have the autonomy, or freedom, to choose how they contribute; and
• Be able to look back and feel a sense of achievement.

A RELIABLE PEOPLE MANAGEMENT PROCESS FOR SMALL BUSINESS

We realised that we could develop a reliable people management process for businesses that provided these natural human desires, and in so doing, reduce the fear and stress for business owners by transforming away from the old command and control approach.

A few weeks ago we talked about the joy of being your own boss?  Would you like to instil that joy in your people?   Here's 5 ways to do it:

1. Be able to talk about why your business exists, and why it matters, so that people can emotionally and intellectually connect to it;
2. Define your values statements that will guide everyone's behaviours, interactions, and decisions in your business;
3. Be able to describe your business in the future, in its perfect form, so that you can build the organisational structure that will enable you to achieve it;
4. Build that organisational structure along with the outcomes of each position in it, so that you and your team have clarity of accountabilities; and
5. Shift the focus of performance reviews away from the discomfort of talking about the person to the person, and onto the inspiration of talking about the required outcomes, how they can be achieved, and what is needed to achieve them.

​We created The H Factor system to help business owners overcome the fear of growing their team. We know there are lots of people with advice, mostly from people who have never run a business, so this system is designed to guide you on your journey and give you the confidence to proceed with purpose.

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