Managing squirrels is a muscle every leader needs to have
Building the worth of your company requires you and your team to have many strong muscles in place. Having the right muscles will help you greatly when selling your company one day to achieve your euphoric exit event.
The muscles needed include strategic thinking, planning and execution. In addition, a muscle is needed for managing the steady stream of ideas, or squirrels, that can come across your plate. We regularly hear from executives that a challenge they face with their team is managing the squirrels and it’s often a source of great frustration. The steady flow of squirrels can be a good thing because it means your team is regularly identifying opportunities for growth or improvement. But if not managed properly, they will hurt your efforts to build company worth because of the constantly changing priorities of what your team is working on.
Here are the leading factors that can cause a leadership team to be frustrated by squirrels:
- The team isn’t aligned around what good looks like longer term. Each person defines it differently which leads to a lack of alignment on short and near term decisions and priorities. One person sees a squirrel as a great idea because they view long term success their way but another person doesn’t agree with the squirrel because the future targets look different to them.
- The strategy and near term tactics for the business aren’t set well enough to be used as a gauge. Knowing your strategies and tactics will give you the needed gauge by which you can measure the value of a potential squirrel. Having clarity and alignment around your team’s strategic and tactical focus will provide the needed gauge to decide which squirrels could be of value.
- The team isn’t aligned around a set of criteria by which a squirrel can be evaluated. Beyond having clarity around strategy and tactics, a set of prioritization criteria can be helpful to determine which squirrels warrant attention. As an example, if we project the squirrel can generate $500K of revenue or greater in less than 12 months, can achieve our average gross margin or better, will require less than 50 man hours to address then we may pursue it….but if it doesn’t meet these criteria, the squirrel doesn’t receive any resources.
Squirrels aren’t a bad thing when they are managed well. Leaders and leadership teams that don’t have a means by which to determine the squirrels that should get attention and those that shouldn’t are hurting the long term worth of the business. Determine whether your team is good at managing the squirrels and if not, think about the steps above to begin building this muscle today.
