Is Your Business Half-Baked?

Have you ever felt like your business is running you, instead of you running your business? That you spend most of your time sprinting around putting out fires? Or giving what you assume are clear directives to instead have the results be nowhere near what you expected? That everyone is excited, committed and competent, yet somewhere between ideation and implementation things go off the rails?

Well, your business might be half-baked.

The Baking of Business

If you’re a baker, you know these two things:

1. The Secret | Pretty much every baker has some tweak or unique additive or technique to make their masterpiece. Be it grandma’s secret ingredient (it’s just a ‘pinch’ more of sugar) or a secret process (turning the oven down 15 degrees for the last 10 minutes).
2. The Basics | Nearly every recipe is going to have staple ingredients. For this exercise, we’re going to focus on flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. These four will be in almost every baking recipe you come across.

Business is similar. Every company has their own secret, that thing that makes them unique, and every company needs the basics, namely leadership and management. Yet as we get going in our businesses we tend to become overly focused on our secret and may neglect the basics. When we do we run the risk of business being half baked. Here are the 3 steps to get you back on track.

Step 1: Make Sure You Have All The Ingredients

In this analogy, we’re just focusing on the four ingredients of flour, sugar, salt and baking powder. These are each an example of leadership or management.

• Flour provides structure. It is the base around which everything else is built.
• Sugar ties everything together. It is part of the glue that makes it all stick.
• Salt is there to enhance. It makes all of the flavors pop.
• Baking Powder makes everything expand. It creates a larger outcome.

Flour and sugar are your basic management ingredients. Managements accountabilities are to activate and optimize. It creates the structure and connection to make everything work. Salt and baking powder are your basic leadership ingredients. Leaderships accountabilities are to set vision and create motivation. It enhances everyone’s sense of value and creates a whole larger than the sum of its parts.

So the first thing you need to determine is if you have all of the ingredients present. 

Step 2: Quality AND Quantity

Once you have all the ingredients you need to check on two things.

• Quality | Make sure you’ve got quality ingredients. Has your flour been sitting on the shelf for a few years? Does it have mealworms? Did your baking powder lose it’s ability to activate? Has your management style gone, well out of style? Is your leadership missing its luster?
• Quantity | Measuring matters. Take sugar and salt. One you usually measure in cups (sugar), and the other in fractions of a teaspoon (salt). Mixing these two up will not a great recipe make. Are you creating an organization that is over led (too much salt) and under managed (not enough sugar)? Or the reverse, over managed and under led?

When you are starting to measure out the ingredients you need to be careful of a couple things.

• Identify | When sitting in bowls, flour and baking powder look very similar, as to salt and sugar. It’s important to make sure you can tell them apart. The same is true for leadership and management.
• Ratios | Flour and sugar (management) will always come in larger quantities than salt and baking powder (leadership). Make sure you’re working with the right ratios. It’s definitely not 50/50.

Step 3: Bring It All Together

Okay, you’ve got all the right ingredients. You even have them in the right quantities. Whew! Okay, we’re done now right? Not quite. When baking we don’t just measure out all the ingredients and put them on a fancy platter and deliver them to our eagerly waiting consumer. We need to mix, bake and deliver. Essentially we need to bring it all together.

The same is true in our businesses. It’s not just enough to have management and leadership defined, and even clearly staffed. We still need to get to the work of getting to work. Basically, we need to answer the question:

If teamwork is what makes the dream work, what makes the team work?

The answer is a mix of the following two situations:

• Management Accountabilities + Leadership Activities | Here we have someone with a manager role engaging in leadership activities. They are bringing some baking powder and salt into their typical flour and sugar focus. An example of this is change management, when a manager helps their team navigate into a new space (ie integrating a new process or system).
• Leadership Accountabilities + Management Activities | Here we have someone with a leader role engaging in management activities. They are bringing some flour and sugar into their typical salt and baking powder focus. An example of this is mentoring, when a leader takes a person under their wing and helps them find focus, build the structure and creating the relationships to get them there.

Ooo, This Is Good? Did You Make This?

And there you have it. Use these three steps to check in and make sure your business if fully baked. Because once it is, I guarantee that not only will your customers be coming back requesting more, so will all of your employees.

If you’d like to learn more about how to make sure your company is fully baked, check out my upcoming book “Manage Your Gaps: Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management”. Now on pre-sale!