I was teaching a workshop recently and met a highly Visionary founder, Chad, who was quite successful. His businesses (yes, plural) were booming. He had the (very) fancy car. He had the (very) fancy watch. And he had a beautiful family at home, too.
But as I spoke not just about how businesses scale but also about who they need on their leadership team and the challenges we experience if we do it wrong, he sat in the front row, looking like he was in shock.
He told me during a break, “Scott, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought to myself, I just need more lieutenants. I can’t do all this myself; I just need more people I can tell what to do and know that they’ll get it done.”
This is a common skill in successful founders. They learn how to attract and equip “do-ers”. We call them Operators. In an entrepreneurial organization, you can’t have much success for very long without this skill.
However, hiring and managing Operator leaders alone is not enough to scale. The decide and do, command and conquer approach will only take you so far.
Chad was experiencing this reality firsthand. He continued to explain, “Virtually every business I’ve built and sold has fallen short of my expectations. I’ve seen so much more potential, but we hit this wall and can’t get through. I can see now that it’s Whitewater that is holding us back. I get that I need Processor leaders, but…”
And then we got to the real problem.
The real problem
Chad then asked, “Aren’t Processors bad people?”
Wow! What a question. I didn’t even have to ask him to explain because he immediately told me the story about a Processor Leader he invited onto a team. After several months of increasing friction, the Processor broke bad and actively worked to destroy the company from the inside out, at one point even holding their entire code base hostage.”
While you may not have had a Processor steal your code, if you’re trying to scale your organization, I can all but guarantee you’ve had a problem with a Processor, maybe even a big one like Chad’s. It may leave you wondering the same thing.
Are Processors bad people?
First off, no, Processors are not bad people. Personality styles don’t account for integrity issues or moral failures. All four styles are equal offenders in both of these categories.
But…
Processors are by far the hardest leadership style to assimilate into an entrepreneurial team. For most founders who fumble through this challenge with trial and error, bringing a high-quality Processor into the team is more likely to fail than succeed.
Three ways we get this wrong
Here are three reasons why we fail to leverage the Processor’s strengths that we need to scale our organizations.
1. We try to hire someone “like us”
Processors aren’t just another kind of lieutenant you can point and shoot. They have questions. They write memos. They take however long they need to do “it” right, no matter how fast you say it needs to happen. And all that adds up to a lot of friction that we write off as a poor cultural fit and a bad hire.
So before you hire a Processor leader, you have to mentally and emotionally commit to hiring a leader who isn’t like you. That’s actually the point. To scale, you need someone (maybe even more than one) who thinks in terms of system and process. In other words, you need a high-capacity leader, but you also need to dramatically redefine what that means in your organization and expand it to include effective Processors.
2. We try to hire someone not “like us”
One of the most common mistakes I see founders make is to hire an uber-Processor. We look for someone with a fancy resume, someone who has worked at a fancy company, someone who we are sure (and they are sure) can help us level up. The intuitive rationale is that the more complexity we face, the more Processor we need.
To an extent, that is true. But it just doesn’t work. Most Visionary/Operator teams simply can’t stand dominant Processors. They are too different, too slow, too stubborn, and, yes, in the pressure cooker environment of Whitewater, often too arrogant to gel well with the team.
So before you hire a Processor leader, find someone with a blended style, a mixture of Processor and Visionary or Operator. While they may not have 100% of the Processor strength of a pure Processor, they will be far more likely to bridge the gap with your current team and help you develop the leadership and decision-making processes your team needs to scale.
By the way, none of this requires any guessing. You can use our leadership styles assessment for free as often as you’d like!
3. We give up on hiring someone else
After trying and failing at both reason 1 and reason 2, we usually give up on hiring a Processor altogether.
It is here that we pick up Chad’s story. After having tried and failed, he wrongly believed that Processors were bad people to keep off of his team at all costs, and all costs included falling short in business after business.
At the end of the talk, he told me, “I’m feeling so convicted right now. But I can also see more clearly than ever. I’m committing to building the right team. This time, it’s going to be different. This time, we’re going to achieve Predictable Success instead of settling and selling for less.”
So before you give up on hiring a Processor leader, you need to make a choice. This choice is so common we have a name for it: The Founder’s Choice. The Founder’s Choice is one of the most significant decisions I help my clients make, and it boils down to this.
- Option 1: Are you happy with what you have? Are you fulfilling your vision for your organization? If so, then choose to keep it simple. Throttle back the growth and have a lot of Fun.
- Option 2: If you can see so much more for you and your organization and you want to scale in Predictable Success, then it’s time to commit to hiring the right Processor leader for your team. You will need to do the work to find, assimilate, and empower them to help you succeed.
If you’d like any help understanding and making your choice, figuring out what stage you’re in and what stage you want to get to, and building the right team (and, if needed, systems and processes) to get you there, schedule a 15-minute fit meeting with me today.
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Is Your Organization Innovative? Or Is It Just You? – Part 3