What do woodworking and running a business have in common?
As the nights started to draw in this winter and the latest lockdown was imposed, I felt like I needed a new hobby to stop me going to stir crazy. My default choice would normally be to go out on my road bike, but I am turning into something of a summer cyclist, something I put down to living in the south of England for too long! (I don’t think “summer cycling” is really a thing in Scotland). So after some time on YouTube, I settled on my new hobby; woodwork. There is potentially no logical reason for this selection: I’m not especially “handy” around the house, I didn’t grow up in a family where we made our own furniture and I definitely lack patience in general, but especially with uncooperative inanimate objects. That said, it is something that I can do in my garage and, hopefully, if the hobby outlasts coronavirus, then it is something I can do with my young sons as soon as they get responsible enough not to hit each other with the hammer.
With a few months of woodwork under my toolbelt, there are some things I have learned which I feel apply directly to the world of work, in particular the role of being a CEO. This is a three part mini-series, and the my first observation of three is as follows:
You need the right tools for the job.
It is mind-bending the sheer number of tools that one can buy when embarking on a hobby like this. It’s also frustrating that you can get so far with building something and no further unless you have this tool that you will only ever use for this one type of job. That aside, what is clear is that if you don’t have good tools, you don’t stand a chance. I built my first table without the use of a nail gun. I figured, I can use a hammer pretty effectively and my fingers are dexterous enough to hold a nail; so what’s the problem? And so I set about making a small table. But, when it came to joining two pieces of wood to make a table leg, I thought I could get away with clamping them together, driving a few nails in and hoping for the best. The result was, each table leg was slightly different to the other. No matter how hard I clamped the two pieces of wood together, when I used my (far too big) hammer to drive the nails in, it would invariably hit the wood or bend the nail, or both, leaving a table leg which was not quite flush. I finally bit the bullet and bought a nail gun. From then on, I could drive the nails in without applying pressure to various other parts of the piece that I was building at the time.
And so it is with business. We need the right people in the right roles. We’ve all worked in businesses where certain people have to be “worked around”. Maybe they’re volatile; good on some days and bad on others. And so it just becomes a “thing” in the business that you need to gauge what mood they’re in before you enter into any kind of dialogue. Maybe they’re the bosses mate. They don’t really have the aptitude to be doing the role their doing, but they do have the right connection(s) so everyone just accepts they won’t be held to the same standard. Maybe they’re popular, or especially well liked and so the boss shies away from any intervention for fear of upsetting the apple cart.
When I was using my manual hammer and nail approach, I still got a result. I still managed to build a table. True, my wife’s first words to be when I showed her it were, “that’s lovely dear, but it stays in the garage”. And in the same way, with the wrong people in the wrong roles, we may still get to a result. But as leaders if we fail to ensure we have the right people in the right roles a number one priority, we can’t expect the output to be anything other than something worthy of the corner of the garage. Getting the right people will require investment (my nail gun was definitely more expensive than my hammer), but like any investment if it’s the right one it’ll deliver a return.