From doing the work to managing the people who do it

You were good at the work. That's usually the entire reason the business exists: somebody kept asking you to do it, then somebody else did, and eventually it made more sense to invoice for it than to keep working for a wage.

Then you hired. And at some point, without a start date or an announcement, your actual job changed from doing the work to making sure other people do it well. Nobody hands you that job description and nobody trains you for it, which is why the transition catches out capable people constantly. Leading a team in a tight Adelaide labour market covers the wider people side; this post is about the specific shift in what you're for.

The promotion nobody gave you

There's no moment where it happens. There's just a Tuesday where you notice you spent 4 hours on the tools, 2 hours answering questions about work you'd already handed over, and 40 minutes at 9pm doing the thing only you can do.

The trap is that both jobs feel like your job, so you do both. The work is the part you're good at and it produces a visible result by 5pm. The management part produces nothing you can point at, so it loses every time the day gets tight. 6 months of that and you've got a business where every decision still routes through 1 person and a team that's learned not to bother deciding anything.

Why the strongest technician makes the hardest manager

The instinct that built the business is the one that gets in the way now.

You can see the error from 30 paces. You can fix it yourself in 4 minutes, and explaining it properly takes 20 minutes plus a check tomorrow. So you fix it. The arithmetic is correct for today and catastrophic over a quarter, because you've just paid 4 minutes to ensure you'll pay another 4 minutes next week, forever, while the other person learns that their job is to get it roughly right and wait.

The second problem is standards. When you did the work, the standard lived in your hands and never needed words. Now it has to be said out loud, in advance, in a form somebody else can aim at, and most owners have never had to articulate it. "You'll know when it's right" is not a standard, it's a memory of one.

The 4 jobs that replace the work you used to do

The management job in a small business isn't complicated. It's 4 things, done repeatedly.

1. Allocate. Decide who does what and say it clearly enough that nobody has to interpret. Ambiguity gets resolved as inaction.
2. Set the standard. Say what finished looks like before the work starts. In advance is coaching. Afterwards is criticism, and it feels completely different on the receiving end.
3. Check. At an agreed point, on an agreed thing, not by hovering. Checking at a stated milestone is management. Checking constantly is supervision, and it's exhausting for everybody.
4. Develop. Give somebody work slightly above their current level, tell them you're doing it, and be available while they do it.

That's the whole job. It looks like less work than what you used to do, and it's harder, because none of it gives you the satisfaction of a finished thing at the end of a day.

The rework trap

Redoing it yourself is the most expensive habit in a small business, and it's invisible in the accounts because it never appears as a line item. It appears as your hours.

The pattern is always the same. You hand something over, it comes back not quite right, you don't have time to explain, so you finish it yourself and say nothing. The other person concludes it was fine. Next time it comes back at the same standard, because nothing in the loop told them otherwise, and now you're annoyed about a gap you personally maintained.

Breaking it means accepting a worse result for a fortnight in exchange for a better one after that, which is exactly the trade that's hard to make in a busy month. Delegation for owner-operators works through the mechanics of handing something over so it stays handed over.

Managing people who used to be your mates

At 6 or 8 staff, the person you're now managing may have started with you, or worked beside you for years, or be the reason you got a big job in the first place. That history is an asset and it makes the standard-setting conversation harder, not easier.

The fix isn't to become formal. It's to be specific. Vague and friendly reads as no problem at all; specific and friendly reads as a real request. How to have the conversation you've been avoiding sets out the structure and the actual words.

What you accept from the person you're closest to becomes the standard for everyone else in the business, whether or not you intend it. That's the mechanism described in culture in a team of 6.

One line worth stating plainly. Everything in this post is management practice. Anything touching pay, hours, entitlements, written terms, a formal step or ending an arrangement has rules around it, and that belongs with your own employment lawyer or a workplace relations adviser rather than with a coach.

What to stop doing this quarter

Adding management to a full week doesn't work. Something has to come out, and it has to be named or it won't actually go.

• Pick 1 recurring task you're still doing that somebody else could do almost as well as you. Hand it over properly: what finished looks like, when you'll check it, what to do when they're stuck.
• Stop answering questions you've already answered. Where the answer keeps repeating, write it down once instead of saying it 9 times. The written version is also the thing you'll hand the next person.
• Book the management time. Put the check-ins and the allocation in the calendar before the week fills. Management that lives in the gaps doesn't happen, because there are no gaps.
• Stop fixing silently. If you redo somebody's work, tell them what you changed and why. A silent fix costs you the time and teaches nothing.

When the business gets past 10 staff

The job changes again somewhere between 10 and 15 people. At that point you aren't managing the work, you're managing people who manage the work, and the skills that got you through the first shift (being specific, setting standards, checking) now have to be taught to somebody else rather than performed by you.

That's different ground, and it's what executive coaching is aimed at: owner-directors and senior people in South Australian businesses at that size, where the constraint is decision-making and delegation across a layer rather than across a team.

What to do first

Take last week and mark each block as work, management, or admin. Not an estimate from memory, the actual week, because memory is generous about the management column.

Then pick the 1 task that gets handed over this month and the 1 standard you'll state out loud that you've only ever assumed. That's the transition, and it happens in small, unglamorous increments rather than in a decision to become a different sort of owner.

If you're weighing up outside help for that shift, it's worth being clear about what kind you need, because leadership coaching and management training solve different problems and the cheaper one is sometimes the right one.