A Road Map and a Role Map

Around age 22 when one finishes college, or before if college is not a pursuit, one thinks about a job and career. In 1968 the first baby boomers turned 22. In 2014 they  turn 68. The boomers, and the generation before them, created millions of closely-held enterprises and professional practices. Succession planning and the sale of business interests is a big topic.

 For business owners or key persons with ownership in an enterprise, you will leave the business at some point due to death, disability, retirement, or to pursue other interests. How will you extract the value that you have accrued in the enterprise? Often an external or internal sale is the path to monetization of value, aside from the few companies that go public. But it isn’t just about graying boomers. Younger employees on a path to ownership have an interest in the growth of a company and continuity strategies, ensuring that the enterprise will continue to grow and prosper if a key person leaves.

 Maria C. Forbes is a Kolbe™ Certified Specialist and team performance consultant in Norcross, Georgia. Along with Debra Robinson, an attorney in Alpharetta, Georgia, we have developed succession planning workshops for business owners. Exiting a business is one thing, but building value along the way is the objective. Focusing on team building in the development of human capital as a critical component of enterprise value, Maria Forbes asks a key question for any entrepreneur: Do you have a staff, or do you have a team? There is a difference.

 George Bush talked about “the vision thing.” You may have a vision of where you want to go, whether as a business or professional person, a leader in any capacity, a family member, or a participant in any activity that depends on the cooperation of others. You may have a road map. But as Maria asks, "Do you have a role map?"

 Do you know clearly what your role is in any team effort? Do you understand the role of the others on your team? Does each team member understand how his or her role relates to every other member on the team? Are individual roles delineated and synergistic?

 Often groups come together, say in a merger of two companies, or within a company or other group effort, excited about the future, and then they set out to decide “who does what?” That’s backwards, and usually dysfunctional. Friction results when roles and personalities clash. Feeling get hurt. Gatekeepers block progress. It happens in companies, charity work, within families dealing with caregiving roles, in any group activity.

 A simple adjustment in thinking about people, their productive efforts, and how they will influence success will help anyone in a leadership position actualize a vision and mission. Team role descriptions outline required skills and experience levels, compatible relational preferences, and instinctive problem solving strengths. The holistic depth of a role description steers leaders away from an incomplete view of  true individual and collective abilities. It replaces job holders and task managers that have only a short term perspective of company or group matters with something more comprehensive and accretive to forward-looking shared success.

 Team performance consultants like Maria Forbes use diagnostics and visioning exercises to determine goals and objectives, the “why, how, and what,” identifying the roles necessary to effect success. People are matched with the needed roles in what becomes a role map. Mind mapping is used to bring clarity to the effort, assign tasks, and chart progress.

 The objective is to avoid friction and give everyone on the team a sense of purpose. Group goals often involve a transition of some kind, getting from one place or state of being to somewhere else. A well-defined track for managing transition involves more than business owners, leaders in any group, or a family experiencing change. The entire organization, group, and family, as applicable, must know why the transition is important to the future and how each person will personally influence its success as one body of properly arranged human energy—ensuring that the team will make the leap, and not jump off the train!

 Lewis Walker is President of Walker Capital Management LLC. and Walker Capital Advisory Services, Inc., a Registered Investment Advisor (R.I.A.) Securities and certain advisory services offered through The Strategic Financial Alliance, Inc. (SFA).  Lewis Walker is a registered representative of SFA which is otherwise unaffiliated with the Walker Capital Companies. ▪ 3930 East Jones Bridge Road ▪ Suite 150 ▪ Peachtree Corners, GA 30092  ▪ 770-441-2603 ▪ lewisw@theinvestmentcoach.com