I have how many roles!?

As an Owner, has your business given you the freedom you wanted? Helped you achieve your goals? Or has the reality of the day-to-day work burnout overshadowed what you craved as you embarked on your ownership journey?

From our experience, SME Owners have at least one, two, sometimes all three of these aspirations.

• They want a fair return on their investment, time and effort.
• They want to have more discretionary time to spend with family or do things they are passionate about.
• They want to grow their business.

For any of these aspirations to become a reality, you need complete clarity on the roles in your business and which of these roles are currently yours!

This exercise of defining roles, decision rights and accountabilities is often eye-opening in itself. The realisation of how much of the business is reliant on you.

We have found that for most of the SME businesses that we work with, the roles fall within the following categories:

Owner: A person who has the decision rights associated with capital and vision.

Director: A person who has the fiduciary responsibilities of the business. In most SME’s this relates to keeping people safe and making sure that the business is solvent.

Organisational Leader: A person who is responsible for the formation and implementation of strategy, while considering the whole system.

Cultural Leader: A person who supports people to optimise alignment between their aspirations and values with those of the organisation.

Function Leader: A person who leads a function of the business and is accountable for the implementation of the strategy.

Team Leader: A person who leads an effective team to deliver on defined accountabilities.

Technician: A person who uses their expertise to deliver on work as effectively as possible.

Once you are clear on your current stack of roles, you can begin developing a strategy to hand over roles, starting from the bottom – Technician.

We have seen many Owners bring in an Operations Manager or a General Manager and begin to hand over higher-level roles first, but this often results in the destruction of your Purpose and Vision. You can end up owning a business you no longer want to work in.

Role by role, you can work towards allowing more space to take on those bigger aspirations.

Would you like the play the game? Download our Role Clarity Card Game to get clear on what roles you currently hold and start planning which ones you can let go of.

Get in touch if you are interested in learning more about our business coaching.