As Chairman of the Surrey group of the Academy for Chief Executives (ACE), I meet with and have the opportunity to learn from, many Managing Directors and company owners.

In the last month alone, partly through attending a number of Surrey Chambers events to talk about ACE’s new Entrepreneurs Board, I have spoken at length with over twenty five people currently running SME sized businesses in Surrey. The personal challenges these leaders are facing today are many and varied but, almost without exception, and seemingly irrespective of the size, growth profile or profitability of the business concerned, lack of time is quoted as the single biggest personal challenge they, as leaders, wrestle with on a day to day basis.

Leadership is all about people, indeed without people there can be no leadership – and as a Managing Director you are only exercising leadership when you’re interacting with your staff and colleagues.

Most leaders recognise that allocating one to one time with their people is a critically important part of their leadership function. Not only does this enable you to communicate what’s important about the business and your priorities but it enhances the employee’s sense of being valued by the company and by you. Ask anyone about the “best boss” they ever worked for and they will always include “he/she always had time for me” as one of that person’s key qualities.

The MDs I meet in particular know this should be one of their key priorities yet freely admit that when the pressure is on, when management and board meetings are added to emails and phone calls and the plethora of unplanned demands on their time from colleagues, customers, suppliers, the bank, financial and legal advisors, it is the “people development” time that so often gets cancelled out of the diary or at best postponed or severely curtailed.

There is no magic cure for the time pressures facing leaders today but one of the best strategies for ensuring you spend quality leadership time with your people is to “steal time” from your own everyday activities. By modifying your approach to how you involve your people in what you’re personally doing it’s amazing how much true leadership time you can find to spend with and actively lead your key people. Here are four tactics I believe will help you do that without adding any time in your diary:

1. Never go alone or with only your sales, buying or finance director to meet key customers, suppliers or even the bank – identify those people further down the organisation who would learn from accompanying and observing you in action. A few minutes spent in the car on briefing your objectives in advance and later reviewing the results of the meeting will be hugely impactful on that individual.
2. Invite a colleague to join you in your office as you make an important phone call – explain the purpose of the call, put the phone on speaker and afterwards review the outcomes vs the objectives.
3. Review your agenda for Board or senior management meetings in advance – identify those elements which aren’t totally confidential and invite a couple of high potential employees to sit in and see for themselves how things are done in the boardroom!
4. “Coffee point leadership” time – consciously prepare a couple of “one minute” topics you can talk about to any member of staff (no matter how junior) spontaneously and seek out everyday opportunities to engage them. It’s amazing what can be achieved in the time it takes to walk from your car to the office door!

Most of us recognise that Leadership and Management are two very different things, and that both are essential to the extraordinary enterprise, but how can we honestly appraise the prevailing balance in the businesses we lead ourselves?

Here are two simple but illuminating definitions to help your own evaluation:

Leadership: The art of getting a competent person to do what you know needs to be done because he/she wants to do it.

Management: The process of dealing with or controlling things or people to ensure good execution.

It is likely that the run of the mill enterprise has only one of these.

What characterises the company without clear leadership is a sense of confusion or uncertainty about “the mission”. The command and control micro manager is in charge here and in any organisation where the emphasis is on control rather than empowerment it won’t matter how many processes, checkpoints, targets or review mechanisms are put in place, the outcome will be the same; at best a functional business reactive to today’s needs with people doing what is demanded of them in their job description but little more.

Sure, management is critical to allocating roles and responsibilities, but if management exists in a vacuum no one will be able to lift their heads up to see if the horizon is getting nearer, because no one has set out a clear direction to look towards.

Leadership provides the focus for everyone’s emotional and intellectual engagement in your business and its goals. It strongly and visibly aligns everybody’s energies towards the future, providing a clear sense of direction and purpose and defining the framework for everyone to operate

It’s become de rigueur in leadership circles that “walking the talk” is a critical must do for any leader. If the boss wants to earn the trust and respect of staff, it’s essential they are seen to act in accordance with company policies and, more critically, with their own pronouncements.

As any MD will tell you, however, this is a lot easier said than done, especially living up to commitments to openness, honesty and integrity. For genuine reasons of competitive sensitivity or confidentiality, MDs sometimes simply cannot be open and honest about everything they know.

That’s fair enough but too often leaders fail to earn the trust of their people, essential to breaking the “them and us” mentality, by not being as open as they could about the 95% of things staff would appreciate knowing about.

If you want to demonstrate your own personal commitment to behaving with openness and integrity here are my Top 5 recommendations:-

• Publish and personally present the annual business plan to all staff and report progress at least quarterly.
• Publish your own top 5 personal objectives so everyone knows what your priorities are.
• Devise an “ask the MD” process where staff can submit any question to you anonymously – and publish your answers.
• Keep your office door open – use a meeting room for private conversations like everyone else!
• Routinely publish your personal diary

If these suggestions seem unworkable, too radical or plain crazy, then I challenge you to ask yourself two questions:

• Why?
• Do I really want staff to feel the company truly values openness, honesty and integrity?
   

Local businesses will have a unique chance to boost their own expertise at an event on Thursday, 21 January at the H.G. Wells Conference & Events Centre in Woking.

Woking Ask The Experts is a free, one-day event for local businesses eager to increase their knowledge and expertise while preparing themselves for the upturn. Attendees will have the opportunity to benefit from free confidential and professional one-to-one advice from 30 specially-selected, locally-based business experts all under one roof.

With such a wide variety of local businesses attending the event, questions will be diverse and will range from ‘How do I reduce my overheads, minimise waste, and increase profits?’ to ‘ How can I generate more traffic to my website?’ or ‘How do I protect my intellectual property?’

The experts will have the answers to these and many more business questions and can provide objective, practical advice to help move businesses forward. Each business attending the event will also have the chance to receive up to £1,500 worth of post-event vouchers from the 30 business experts. The vouchers will be valid for up to six months and will offer a variety of products and services including reduced memberships, free professional advice, one-to-one coaching and more.

Woking Ask the Experts, sponsored by Surrey Chambers of Commerce, Woking Town Centre Management, Morrison’s Solicitors, and Business Link, is the first event of its kind to take place in Surrey. A total of 420, bookable, 20-minute, one-to-one, advice sessions will be available on the day, and the event will be structured so that visitors can drop in when they want for all or part of the day.

The business topics will be categorised under four main headings in four corresponding zoned areas within the H.G. Wells Centre –

• Reduce Overheads
• Grow your Business
• Up Skill your People
• Keep it Legal

As well as stimulating the local economy by encouraging local businesses to support local businesses, this unique event also promises excellent networking opportunities to make new contacts with 300 local companies. There will be no sales pitches.

Inspirational speaker and business guru Robert Craven – acclaimed as one of the UK’s most sought-after speakers on the subject of entrepreneurship and business growth – will also be at the event to share his top tips for success. Other guest speakers are yet to be announced.

Woking Ask The Experts is going to be a fantastic event for local businesses; it is very rare that we are given the chance to gather so many experts under one roof and draw on such resources for free. “I would strongly urge anyone serious about growing their business to grab this opportunity with both hands,” said Louise Punter, Chief Executive of Surrey Chambers of Commerce.

Book your place for Woking Ask The Experts by registering online at the website: 

http://www.wokingasktheexperts.co.uk/

Surrey Chambers breakfasts continue to thrive, giving businesses the chance to meet those all important contacts before the rest of the days work begins. The clocks going back can only encourage us to leap out of bed when the alarm goes off! The feedback from these local meetings has been very positive with attendance between 20 and 40.

One breakfast, which was really worth getting to was part of the British Chambers Growth Clubs initiative and brought us a speaker of great quality. Royston Guest from Pti Ltd talked to us about p2p instead of b2b and stressed the importance of people in our businesses. He reminded us that 77% of the year had already gone so the time for action was now. We were encouraged to give exceptional customer service EVERY TIME and compared ourselves to successful brands such as Singapore Airlines, Nokia and Starbucks. By the end of the session we were able to verbalise what business we were in rather than what we did. Surrey Chambers is definitely in the business of helping you grow your business and we are now working on the exceptional customer service! Further Growth Clubs will be taking place covering Technology, finance and communications. These are workshop style sessions with limited numbers so early booking is advised.

We were delighted this month to welcome Jon Jagger to our Board of Directors. Jon is a partner for Menzies LLP, a highly reputable accountancy firm based in Woking, Egham, Leatherhead, Kingston and Farnborough. Jon brings his accountancy skills but also experience of working with many small and medium sized businesses. He will be a great addition to the board, bringing his ideas and thoughts to the strategy of Surrey Chambers going forward.

Members of Surrey Chambers should have received by now an invitation to join the Surrey Chambers of Commerce Advisory Panel. Over 150 people have signed up, which is really good news. This will enable us to get quick feedback on various issues and panel members will also get the opportunity to take part in other surveys if they wish.

The Innovation and Growth Team has been launched in Surrey with the support of a number of organisations including Surrey Chambers. As well as having specific expertise in incubating, growing and managing businesses, they also have extensive sector experience spanning IT, telecommunications, new media, central and local government, aerospace, defence, medical, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, agriculture and retail. They are very keen to talk to any businesses looking for support. Their website is now up and running and worth a look. www.innovationgrowth.co.uk/surreyhants

The second Surrey cohort for Common Purposes InsideOut programme is about to start but there is still the opportunity for a couple of business people to join it. Common Purpose InsideOUT brings together leaders from distinct locations in the ‘powerhouse’ circle that surrounds London, enabling participants to see how local decisions are affected by wider regional issues. The programme invites participants to examine their own locality and leadership challenges, to reveal how each area is interconnected, often in surprising ways, what the leaders can learn from each other and what they can achieve by working together. Having participated in this programme it is a great way to learn about the wider community and how a business can have more influence and impact. http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/programmes/insideout.aspx

For many events and activities designed to meet the needs of all types of businesses, please view http://www.surrey-chambers.co.uk/events_main.mp  or speak to Surrey Chambers of Commerce on 01483 726655.

Pat Jones and Amanda Fisackerly, chairman, EWiB

EWiB chairman Amanda Fisackerly organised an excellent Saturday morning talk about “The Menopause” with Pat Jones, SRN menopause specialist nurse and complementary therapist.

I didn’t think you could laugh at the “menopause”, but Pat gave a light-hearted look at the menopause, its symptoms and what you can do about them.  She said the main cause for menopausal symptoms was the lack of oestrogen produced.

There was much discussion about the pros and cons of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Pat says “At the end of the day, everyone is an individual and the solution for every woman’s menopausal symptoms is going to differ. What we’re aiming for is a good quality of life.”

She said that menopause can affect women as early as 30, although the most common age was 50. “Some women can be as late as 56,” she added.

Alternative remedies such as black cohosh, red clover, dong quai, sage, agnus castis and phytoestrogens, like soya were discussed. “You need to give anything like this at least three months to see what the effects are,” she said.

A healthy lifestyle will help tremendously in getting through the menopause.  “Take care with your diet, make sure you get enough exercise and don’t put a lot of weight on.”

Useful website : British Menopause Society www.thebms.org.uk