If your SME is growing and has its own business and marketing organization; is the organization starting to be complex? If so then Distributed Leadership brings out the best in you and your business.
Distributed Leadership Brings Out the Best in You and Your Business
As Wikipedia says, in the “context of a complex organization …. understanding leadership from a distributed perspective means seeing leadership activities as a situated and social process at the intersection of leaders, followers, and the situation”
Terri Kelly, CEO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, writes in No More Heroes: Distributed Leadership that: “it is impractical to expect the single leader to have all the answers, and history has shown that relying upon rigid control mechanisms will not prevent catastrophic outcomes. … It’s far better to rely upon a broad base of individuals and leaders who share a common set of values and feel personal ownership for the overall success of the organization. These responsible and empowered individuals will serve as much better watchdogs than any single, dominant leader or bureaucratic structure.”
A primary need is to align your business uniformly.
Greater profits
Extensive research on this has showed that having this sort of approach elevates your business profit to the next higher level. Once you implement this approach, you are surely going to experience increased customer satisfaction. Added to this, there is employee satisfaction and greater return for your investors.
Materialize what you have in mind
Your job is to distribute the given work among those who work for you. Since you are the boss and more experienced in this field, you must exchange your views with the others. This approach will give your workers a much clearer idea of the work and hence you will naturally receive much more healthy and profitable output.
You need to materialize the idea and the picture you have in mind. This is the primary step towards an integrated approach. This allows the workers to follow the same strategy that you have in mind to make this business a huge success. In the case of sales and marketing jobs, it’s good to have ideas and various marketing actions, but marketing must remain in alignment with sales.
Distribute the work and give them a clearer idea
With the approach of distributed leadership, you can empower employees who are working under you and can give them much higher responsibilities. This allows you to be freed up from such petty works and concentrate on more important topics.
So you provide a clear cut vision and mission approach for (for example) sales. Gradually, you can feel the change and improvement; as your team will be able to take up more responsibility more quickly; and can finish the tasks faster as well.
Do your homework properly
But what really matters is how you plan out the work. The reason behind this is that you are going to be the one to distribute your idea. And if the idea isn’t great enough then having distributed leadership or an excellent market alignment will not help.
References
- Organising in the Information Age: Distributed Technology, Distributed Leadership, Distributed Identity, Distributed Discourse (Voices in Development Management) by Len Holmes (Editor), Dian Marie Hosking (Editor), Margaret Grieco (Editor) available from Amazon.com
- Distributed leadership and knowledge sharing in a worldwide network
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I remember as a kid in Sunday school learning about Moses getting run ragged – just like a guy today trying to run his own SME. He was trying to judge the entire Children of Israel and along comes his dad-in-law Jethro and says, “Hey, dude… you need to DELEGATE.” (Yeah, our Sunday School leaders said stuff like dude.)
Like Moses, I’ve found that getting my staff on board and empowering them pays off in Biblical proportions down the line, too. Now I can take vacations, even call in sick from time to time if I have to – or head out early to catch my kids ball game. This is why we do it, right?