“An entrepreneur’s lust needs to be counterbalanced with a manager’s prudence and discipline.”

~Gino Wickman

 

In continuation of our blog series covering Gino Wickman’s “Traction” this week we will be looking at The People Component. Our last post covered the marketing approach.

Now that you have established the core values of your business, you can now work on getting people involved who share these same values. These people may already be a part of your business, people applying to work for your business or people you feel would ideally fit in with your business.

Set a standard for evaluation of whether the employees, be they current or prospective, by using your core values that you established in earlier exercises. Once you find the right people for your business, you need to work on getting those people in the right seats.

Having someone in the right seat means more than they are the right person for the job. They need to understand their role in the company, enjoy the work they do and have ample time to do the job properly.

Along with the Vision/Traction Organizer, another tool Wickman introduces for our use is the Accountability Chart. This chart can be used to organize and clarify the roles of everyone in your business. It shows a hierarchy while briefly summarizing positions. As stated in the text, most of what is done in your business can be broken down into three categories: Sales & Marketing, Operations and Finance & Administration. Using these categories as a base, you can start building your Accountability Chart.

There are two unique roles that can be added to your Accountability Chart, integrator and visionary. Integrators are those who are good at keeping people on their toes and work through logic-based reasoning. Visionaries are more creative minded and are ideas people. Not all companies have a visionary. The text recommends looking around internally in your company to see if you have a visionary. Wickman mentions that often times in business partnerships one person is the integrator and the other the visionary.

Don’t be alarmed if you are noticing some major changes in your leadership structure once completing the exercises; the text states that “data shows that 80 percent of the time, there’s a change in the leadership team.”

To put people in leadership roles you want them to understand their role, enjoy the work they do and have the means to accomplish their job. Like the exercise that we have discussed in previous posts and will cover in the future, these exercises are not that time consuming and pay invaluable dividends once implemented.

Stay tuned for the next in our blog series inspired by Gino Wickman’s “Traction.”

 

“Traction” by Gino Wickman is available on Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble and your local library.