There are times in business when you have to come back to making the main thing the main thing.  This means coming back to a high level view, to the vision and the mission of the organisation.  Having run businesses myself both past and present, I know how easy it can be to get caught up in fire-fighting and crisis management.

As the business owner or person in charge it seems at times that the more you look into what is going on in the business, the more you find what really frustrates you and the more you feel yourself getting dragged into detail you were never meant to be involved in.

Anyone leading an organisation faces this challenge on a day-to-day basis.  How do I take the business forward and keep myself from the madness of micro-management.

Part of the problem is that we are action focused.  We are always on a mission.  In fact, of all the people in the business you are on the biggest and most passionate mission of all as you are the closest to the business both practically and emotionally.

Feeling like a spare part?

We hate having nothing to do, feeling surplus to requirements or not needed, so we all too often turn this positive drive in on the organisation instead of doing what we should be doing which is leading the business forward.

The affects of this can be positive but in all too many cases people working in the business who are professional and for the main part, competent can start to feel like you are poking your nose in where it is not needed.

My response to this in the past has been 'hang on!  This is my business, I will poke my nose in wherever I want', and of course we can, but the affects might not always be productive.

The point I am leading to is that we need to refocus ourselves to stop ourselves from getting into these situations.

As business owners, directors and so on we need to get a very firm handle on the future in order to leave the present to get on with itself whilst we watch from a distance.

Clarity produces commitment

If we are not clear about where we are heading or unsure that we have the commitment of the key people around us to make something happen we are left with a notion of where we might like to go, but without the real impetus to start to turn that into reality.

This can be a frustrating place to be and only serves to make us ever more short tempered and slip ever more into over-managing the details.

The solution is to get a vision of where you want to go and start to work on that rather than the internal details of the status quo.

It's not quite as simple as that of course (if only it was).  As business leaders we recognise that we need people to make things happen.  Nothing happens without the buy-in and cooperation of teams and most notably the people who we work with and rely on who form our core team members.

A Vision Statement is not enough

Our challenge is not just to come up with a vision but also to create a way of getting people on board, motivated and clear about what they need to do to make that vision a reality.

One great way to do this is to invest time into getting your team together to work through the fundamental questions of business:

• what are we here to do?
• who are we here to serve?
• what do we want for the future?
• where are we now?
• how are we going to make steps towards our future vision?

Unless we start to explore these questions and start to get a firm grip on our vision for the future, nothing will happen and we will just carry on doing what we have been used to doing.