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Losing Control

I never saw myself as a control freak.

I always thought that I was someone who could let other people go to do their thing, the ability to delegate and help and support and watch people grow up and grow out and become better versions of themselves.

But maybe that's a lack of insight on my part, or within the last three or four years, things changed, and events affected me, making me feel that I had to fix everything.

Much has happened to me and the team since the pandemic and since we built the clinic and everything that transpired after those events.

This week, I've had the requirement, will or desire to tell that story to people who've never heard it before face to face. 

It does bring back into sharper focus and perspective where we were and, what happened and how profound those whole experiences were, not only just on me but on my family.

Of course, now I can look at it from an entirely different perspective; through my retrospectoscope, I can see where I was all through the middle of 2020, all through the winter of 2020 to 21 and everything that we did just to try to stay alive and to keep everything going and to keep everyone in their jobs (not least me) and how we won and succeeded.

We moved on quickly from there but never really had the time to celebrate or to relax.

But after I had moved from a situation where I was sitting back and watching and delegating, I had ended up deep back in the trenches, a private in the Army, not a general, someone who was charged with firing at other people with keeping people alive and with stomping through the mud whenever I was told.

I'm pretty happy to do that job. I am never too proud to do the stuff that nobody else wants to do, but the truth is that our trajectory as a business needs something else and maybe someone else and possibly that someone else can't be me, or perhaps that someone else is me, it just has to be a different version of me.

Some time ago, Chris Barrow gave me an excellent book from his business coach, who described three personalities in business from the start-up to the grown-up business.

This was the brave warrior.

That's the person who makes a start-up work.

They'll do it all.

They'll bootstrap.
They'll carry everyone, and by sheer force of will, they'll keep the company alive until it reaches a critical mass.

Once it reaches that critical mass, though, you need a considered architect (that is never me). 

That is, someone who revels in finishing tasks, someone who can see and design systems which allow for the repetitive production of quality, which keeps everyone within the guard rails.

I need a considered architect to tell me what to do (that's Hayley). 

Beyond that, as your business gets bigger, you need a wise monarch.

That's the person who's able to tell other people when and what to do but not actually to do it themselves.

The wise monarch doesn't really 'do the work'. 

The wise monarch sees the work of other people.

That will be the hardest transition for me if I am to further grow the business. If I am to be able to lead the business in the direction that it's going will be to lose control, 

I will have to walk past things that are happening and let them happen and let people get it wrong, or at least when I say wrong, I mean to do it differently than how I would have done it and trust the fact that it will be OK and that we will continue to move in a direction.

That is harder than it seems. 

Giving away the things you have built and the stuff you have done is harder than people can understand unless they have to do it themselves.

But it's never supposed to be easy, any of this.

It's supposed to be difficult because if it were easy, everybody else would always do it.

By Colin Campbell on 22/09/23 18:00