In the world of business, even seasoned leaders face challenges and get it wrong. The co-founder and CEO of Koda Capital, Paul Heath, recently shared some of his biggest learning moments on the ’15 Minutes with the BOSS podcast’.

He spoke about the impact that change has on the people in an organisation.

“Change can look great on a strategy document. Actually, getting that change to stick with people, with good people, and taking them on a journey for change, that’s the bit that’s hard. That’s often underestimated by leaders.”

When leading the ‘doers’ in your organisation, you need to be able to recognise and realise the pain that the change is going to evoke in them and then consider the impact and plan for it accordingly. Those doer leaders are often already carrying a disproportionate amount of the results burden. Spending time getting their feedback and buy-in is essential before launching in.   

Paul also spoke about how ‘being the “doer,” versus helping manage the people who are the “doers,” is a very different skill set. Many business owners are great “doers” but not so good at managing and delegating! Often, we learn through our mistakes in this area – not truly delegating until we absolutely must and then doing it badly. Taking the time to understand, support and train the people in the organisation so they have the skills execute changes appears very slow at first. However, it’s like the fable of the hair and the tortoise, the hair sets off strong, however, the consistent plodding of the tortoise gets him over the line first.    

Initially slowing down, to later speed up, we think is key to breaking the cycle of the impatient “ready fire aim” that so often plagues the efforts of emerging growing companies.

We would love to hear from you about how you moved from being the “doer” to managing the “doers”, including how you got buy-in to your ideas about change from the team.   

Good luck and stay safe.                                                            

References:

       [1] https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/leaders/top-ceo-reveals-the-biggest-mistakes-he-ever-made-20240607-p5jk6l