Are you plagued by complaints from your team members about others? Do you find they expect you to do something about ‘personality clashes’?

Like these..?

  • He’s making my life a misery, looking over my shoulder and meddling in my work
  • She can’t be trusted to do her job without being chased
  • He’s pushing for promotion – but he’s a doer, not a manager and I can’t seem to get that across to him
  • She wants to be a senior account executive, so we’ve given her the job title and she’s really pleased

…all things that have been said to me by clients and potential clients in the last couple of years.

These complaints all betray a very common misconception about leadership of people in a smallish business. And my clients usually think the answer is some kind of coaching or training for the individuals in conflict- or self-management skills. So, they call in the business coach.

And it might be the solution. But nowhere near as often as you might suppose.

It’s (probably) not about the individuals

In small organisations, clashes happen. People work closely together and the cycle from sales to fulfilment can be very short. You depend very much on the person next down the line to do their bit and do it accurately and fast. It’s easy to assume that the clashes that occur are ‘personality clashes’ – in other words, in some way personal.

However, if, as leader, you take an organisational view – which I grant is easier for me than for you in the firing line – this may not be about personality at all.

In the hurly burly of setting up and running a smallish business, everyone tends to take a role and get on with delivering to the best of their ability. There’s very little time to discuss the nuances of one person’s understanding of what’s expected versus another’s. But as your organisation grows, employs more people and gets more complex the ‘Chinese whispers’ effect of these early assumptions about what’s required, get magnified. And, boom! ‘Personality clashes’.

Maybe they don’t really know what’s needed

‘But of course they do’, you say. ‘They’re intelligent, diligent people and committed to doing a good job’. And of course, like the vast majority of people, they are – but when did you last bring them together to discuss with other people up and down the delivery line what they think their jobs are? Or where their job ends and the other person’s begins? Or the exact standards to which they should deliver the work?

A practical and often overlooked solution to these clashes lies in clearly defining and clarifying people’s roles. I’ve lost count of the number of times that as a result of a simple role clarification process, properly facilitated, with all the right people in the room, ‘personality clashes’ have just melted away.

The smaller the organisation…

Unlike larger organisations, small businesses lack processes, buffers and structured hierarchies, so minor misunderstandings escalate quickly. The problem for you as leader, is that it can seem hard to find the time and space to sit back and look at the problem as a whole – to get everybody off the job for a day or so to bottom out where the problems lie. Then you can put in place solid agreements over deliverables and standards that will make everything work more smoothly, and everyone more productive, for the next phase of your business’s growth.

But look at it this way…

If you never took any exercise – worked on yourself – you’d never get fit. And one day you’d injure yourself or fall ill and then you wouldn’t be able to live your life and do your work at all. Your business is just the same. The sooner you establish a regular practice of working on your business, the less likely things are to go off the rails. Now I know you probably know this in terms of work planning, or doing your finances, but, I hear you say, ‘surely I don’t have to help people understand what a good job looks like? Shouldn’t they just know?’

Well, they do – individually. But your business is a system – a small machine that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Each part needs to slot into the next so that the whole runs smoothly. And the only way you get this effect with people is to take time out, with all the right people in the room, and work it out – together.

Time well spent

Then what you will get is what we promise our clients:

  • Complete clarity on the role of each member of the team.
  • Clarity on how the success of each accountability will be measured.
  • A commitment from each team member to delivering his/her role as it needs to be done to support the business. Note, not to their own personal standards, however good these are!
  • Reduction in gaps, overlaps and mistakes in work.
  • A common language and process for resolving future issues between team members.
  • A platform for future management of performance in the team and increased personal accountability
  • A platform for future targeted recruitment and succession planning.
  • Increased mutual understanding between members of the team.

Isn’t that time well spent?

Click this link to see an outline of a typical programme. If you’d like to discuss how we can help you produce results like these, call Kate on 07801 259637.

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