In this week's business blog, we're going to jump to leadership roles and leadership roles at the top of your organisation, but first of all, I want to make it clear that you can assume leadership roles in any size of organisation, even an organisation of one.
If you're a single-handed subcontractor or self-employed freelancer, you can use different times of your working week to be different people in your work.
One day, you could be a marketing guy trying to drum up business, another a sales guy trying to capture the business, another the chairman, trying to decide what you'll be doing for the next 3 years, and another two working in your business, doing the thing that generates the money.
Alternatively, you could just work 5 days generating the money, but you would miss out on the opportunity to make it better to market, to sell, and to develop a strategy.
Bizarrely, this week, on the same day, I had conversations with people from other organisations I work with as a volunteer, mostly asking me for advice on moving forward with the bigger picture of their organisations.
Both of these organisations have grown dramatically over the past 5 to 7 years and now they're in a situation where they're stretched and stretching. People are outside their comfort zones, outside their usual roles, deciding whether the organisation's got too big or whether it can get bigger with a different approach.
And so, we came across the jobs of chairman and chief executive in both of these organisations. In effect, in our business, we have exactly these roles: I assume the role of chairman, and Hayley Brown assumes the role of managing director (or CEO, or whatever you like to call it).
These two rules are fundamentally different, and you can adopt these roles in your own business. However big, you have to understand the difference between the roles.
When you put the hat of the chairman on, you are entirely strategic and the guardian of the vision of your organisation, so you're not operational at all and should not be dealing with anything in the trenches.
If you're doing that half a day a week or as your permanent job, you have to push back on the operational stuff.
During this extraordinary day where different people were asking me about these job roles, I was in a meeting in the office with two guys from our academy team, working on something which is really, really important for the future moving forward; somebody knocked on my door and said, "you need to come downstairs now because one of your dentists has a problem with a patient getting this tooth out".
Remember that I'm just back from 6 weeks away from work where I wasn't here, and so with my chairman's hat on, I said, "What would you have done last week?" and the person said, "I would have gone and got this other dentist to help", and I said, "go and do that now and then come back if it doesn't work". They never came back.
The Colin of old would have run downstairs to be a hero, sorted the problem out, taken the praise and come back up, but would have missed out on the opportunity of creating something brilliant for later in the strategic role that I was playing that day.
And so, in the calls with the people I was talking to from the other organisations that I work with, we were very clear about the role of chairman and the role of chief executive.
The chairman is the custodian of the vision, someone who works at the strategic level in every minute of their work when they do that work.
The chief executive is happy to help construct the vision but takes the vision forward and implements it on a day-to-day basis through the instruction, leadership, inspiration and direction of the team who are tasked with making it become a reality.
Although this may sound like a high-level MBA business, it isn't; it's fundamental.
You can also adopt this principle in your own life.
Taking out the urgent important stuff of paying the bills, cooking the food, doing the shopping, cleaning the toilets, and having a little bit of time to be the chairman of your life 'what will we be doing 3 years from now, and how will we get there?'.
Once you see it like that, the roles separate, it becomes easier, and the work you do becomes varied and wonderful and different.
Get a bit of paper and your favourite hot drink (coffee, tea, whatever) and spend a little bit of time being the chairman and then a little bit of time being the chief executive and then you can get back to work.