Evolving leadership makes the difference
Lee Munro | 4 minute read
Key points
- Leading well is key to driving business growth.
- Shift from doing to guiding.
- Focus on team and direction.
Leadership is about adaptation
In leadership, your personal ability to adapt is ultimately what determines the long-term success of your business.
Most businesses fail to scale not because the idea is wrong or the market turns against them. But because leadership doesn’t evolve fast enough to match the demands of growth. In fact, 56% of SME leaders admit to wearing too many hats.
But what works at the startup stage won’t necessarily work as your business scales. During the startup phase, the leader of the business pretty much does everything. Designing the product or service, finding customers, answering the phone, and so on.
Yet, knowing when to shift your focus, delegate responsibilities. And build the right team is the key to longer-term growth.
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When doing everything becomes the problem
Our family has been in the footwear business for 70 years. Today, our business, Munro Footwear Group, is one of the largest privately-owned Australian footwear companies, with over 250 stores nationally and a presence in 14 global markets.
Yet, in the early 2000s, my mother inadvertently limited our growth by trying to do everything herself. While she was regularly up at 3am doing the books and admin, keeping the business lean and efficient, it was not allowing her to focus on what was needed to grow the business. Observing her challenges, I took a gap year before university and helped digitise everything so she could focus on growing the business, not doing the paperwork.
For all business owners trying to do everything yourself, hear me: it’s not sustainable. You must move past that stage and, even better, do it early on in your company’s life cycle. Back then, we told ourselves we couldn’t afford to hire anyone, but this false economising ended up becoming the problem.
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Leadership is letting go without losing control
A key topic we often discuss at the Australian Centre for Business Growth is the art of delegation. It’s crucial for leaders to empower their team to do different tasks. So the leadership group can step back, view the business with a wider lens, set the direction and drive growth.
In the early 1990s, shoes as a product fell into two camps: comfortable or fashionable. My mother’s desire for both meant we found a niche and could thrive. But as wholesalers, we remained quite insular for the next decade or so, until we got past our biggest challenge for a long time: struggling to expand our executive team beyond family.
After participating in the Australian Centre for Business Growth’s first Growth Modules program in 2014, a shift in our mindset eventually sent our business growth through the roof! We altered our approach, started believing in our own abilities and learnt to delegate to others. This led to a rapid growth phase. We began acquiring a few small footwear retailers. The combination of finding the right people for our company who aligned with our values and culture, and learning to trust each other in our roles, helped us scale rapidly. And today we’re generating more than $300 million in revenue each year.
It’s vital to get the right executive team around you as fast as you can. You can’t do everything on your own, particularly when you are scaling. As we grew our company, we learnt that we needed people from outside the business, with expertise in specific areas that we lacked, or who could represent us well when we’re not around.
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Define your purpose and recruit the right people
Building a business set up for continuous growth is incredibly hard work. You’re not always going to get it right, and growth is rarely in a straight line. Write down your vision, define your mission, know the purpose, then recruit the right people to help you fulfil your goals. Aim for culture fit first over skillset to set the tone for your new team. This has been essential for Munro Footwear Group as we’ve grown from a founding team of two to a national team of over 2,500 people.
If you’re aiming for fast growth, begin by building out a leadership team as soon as possible. Take the risk to appoint people who can implement your business growth plans rather than retreat to a safe and comfortable approach. Otherwise, by the time you think you need someone, you probably needed them six months ago, and it could take another six months to find the right person. Lacking the right talent at the right time can then stall company growth.
No matter what stage of business growth you’re in, there will be more to do than time available to do it. So, set your company vision, adopt a delegation mindset, hire the right people, build your culture and team for growth, and watch your business soar.