Award winning business coach Andrew Priestley talks about key mistakes made by owner managers running established medium sized businesses. Andrew is the founder of Priestleys Coaching and provides profiling, training and coaching worldwide. Visit www.andrewpriestley.com
1. Key Mistakes of Business Leaders 2
Hi, I’m Andrew. I am an award winning business coach qualified in psychology and
I specialize in coaching owner managers running already successful medium sized
companies.
My clients are typically successful, high achieving, qualified and intelligent but
even so, they still have blind spots.
With that in mind here’s some of the key leadership mistakes that they were
making.
Failing to Communicate Your Awareness
In Key Mistakes #1, I talked about ignoring your awareness which at your level is
potentially quite expensive. I gave an example of Nevil, who has a large warehouse
and noticed that staff parked the company forklift in front of a fire exit. Apart from
being unsafe it is also illegal (in the UK).
Nevil mentioned this problem to his warehouse manager who said he’d ‘look into
it.’ That was months ago and since then, Nevil has not raised the matter again.
It gets worse.
If Nevil sees the forklift parked there he will move it himself. Despite that it always
ends up back in that same spot.
The problem is this: Nevil is aware of a problem that is not resolving and he is
saying nothing.
I started my coaching career working with high compliance industries. In civil
aviation, for not communicating your awareness effectively is a serious problem.
We know this because of plane crash investigations. The investigation invariably
focuses on the black box flight recorder; specifically what was not said. What did
the pilot fail to communicate?
We also know this from industrial accident investigations. Invariably it comes down
to what was not said, as well. For example, a small front-end loader was working
near a trench. It collapsed killing a worker in the trench. The subsequent
investigation showed that the site foreman had seen the loader visit the trench
edge eight times where men were working … and said nothing.
Not surprisingly, in almost all cases, the person was well aware of a problem … but
said or did nothing.
If you are an air traffic controller and you fail to register a critical incident you can
lose your job and even go to jail for criminal negligence. If you are running a critical
2. care unit at a hospital and a staff member is routinely late for work, you have a
legal obligation to log that incident.
I worked with an airport manager who’s safety officer had panic attacks whenever
a plane landed. He knew about that for 3 years! Worse they didn’t Under civil
aviation law that manager can go to jail.
I discovered that you do not need to be running a high compliance business to
benefit from these tools.
Ron is aware that he has too many late-paying customers. His debtor days have
stretched out to an average 120 days plus which is the key reason his business has
frustrating cashflow problems. He is also aware his CFO – is required to chase
debts but doesn’t because she hates chasing debts.
There are many reasons why people don’t speak up, but whatever your reasons, if
you are aware of a problem … and you are aware you need to say something …
and you don’t speak up as and when required then you are the problem.
I coached a barrister who was aware that his paralegals compiled complex
documents via cut and paste. This had resulted in several red-faced in-court
documentation errors. And even though he is a seasoned QC he was reluctant to
mention this to his staff!
That’s why he needed a coach.
It may not be easy, but if you need to speak up, speak up.
You can read more Leadership Mistakes by searching Andrew Priestley at
www.slideshare.com or www.andrewpriestley.com
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business-leaders