Craig Counsell, manager of the Chicago Cubs, has questioned how the baseball industry looks at pitchers. There used to be a school of thought that pitchers had to have a specialized role. For example, you were a starter, long reliever, middle reliever, setup man or closer. Yet Counsell doesn’t get hung up on roles. From his perspective, pitchers create value when they achieve outs — regardless of when it happens in the game.
This got me thinking about value creation and problem-solving. In any business there are two basic types of stakeholders: buyers and suppliers. Customers buy from a company because it solves some sort of problem for them. Conversely, a company pays suppliers because they provide something needed to solve a problem. Thus, business owners can view employees as suppliers because they provide time, talent and effort to solve problems.
Creating value for their company should be a primary motivator for employees; otherwise, they risk becoming irrelevant. The more problems they can identify and solve for the company, the more they should be rewarded. Yet clarity is essential here. For example, companies may have job descriptions, but do these discuss what type of problems these positions are supposed to tackle — and how the resulting effort creates value for the company? If employees aren’t clear on how they create value, there can be a disconnect, resulting in inefficiencies, poor performance and disengagement. Indeed, in the roundtables that I facilitate for the foundation, there is often discussion among CEOs about how employees are creating problems rather than solving them.
The same lens can be applied to business leaders. What problems do you solve for your company? Even more important: Are those the right problems to spend time on? In other words, are you really creating value?
In second stage, one of the things you should be doing is setting a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) for your team. You need to establish a vision, communicate to your team how you plan to get there and allocate resources to make that happen.
Another way that CEOs create value is by establishing a strong culture. By culture, I mean a set of desired behaviors of how you want employees to treat customers — and each other. Culture doesn’t happen by itself. Everyone should be driven by the same core values.
Like employees, CEOs often become confused about where they add value. For example, they may continue to be knee-deep in the business, doing technical work or trying to solve their managers’ problems instead of being the visionary, setting strategy and establishing a culture that will attract and retain talent and drive growth.
Too often, business owners, especially ones in second stage, have a hard time looking at their organization objectively. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that “This is my baby” or “I’m the business.” You’re not.
To break away, you have to think of the business as a separate entity. You aren’t serving yourself; you’re serving the organization that you created. And because you are serving the organization, it has problems that need to be solved — but at your level.
The goal for both business leaders and employees is to be solving problems that are appropriate for your position. You want to be an organizational asset — rather than an asshat.