Not long into a conversation with a few small business owners the other day, it became blatantly obvious that a lot of people manage their businesses like they manage their own lives - very personally.
It's to be expected personal emotion will exist in a business environment and for the most part this is a good thing. Positive emotions can give rise to a motivation to succeed, help others, and, in larger companies, work to move up the career ladder, while negative emotions can see people lie, cheat, become angry and generally react to situations in ways that are not genuinely motivated by common sense or good business practices.
In a small startup business where a huge amount of the work has been done by a person or small group of people, personal emotion has been there since day one. These emotions got them excited enough to start the business in the first place. It kept them going in the tough times and pushed their business ideas forward. But like the solid fuel cells a spaceship uses to jettison itself into space, personal emotions in business must be discarded when their usefulness has been exhausted.
This fundamental misunderstanding of how personal emotions can affect business and its management sees the rise of almost all arguments, employment issues and partnership break-ups and seems to be where many small businesses begin to fail while so many large companies survive.
To allow your business (or even work life in general) to thrive, a line must be drawn between how people act and react in business compared with how they do in everyday life. Put simply, it needs to be understood that 'it's not personal". In line with this statement managers and bosses also need to be aware of what the motivation for their decisions are and decide whether they are in the best interests of business or their own egos.
To use a limited liability company as an example: a company is, in essence a separate entity to any person, with liabilities limited to only what the company does. By that same definition a company can not feel offended, embarrassed, angered or ridiculed. This is not to say people can't make these assertions, but they will have no emotional impact on the company because the company has no emotions. In large companies 'personal emotions' are curtailed at multiple levels through the use of middle management, HR departments, in-house lawyers, complaints departments, personal secretaries and so on. In smaller businesses, however, most of these buffers do not exist and the day-to-day reality of the boss having to deal with the lowliest and often most emotionally charged members of a business or its customers are certain.
For a boss, manager or leader to successfully control the direction a business takes, there must be a conscious disconnect made so that each and every business decision is made using only logical, lateral thought. In doing this each decision will be made on its commercial merits alone and not be muddled by what someone said around a water cooler or was read between the lines in an email. To follow this simple approach is to rise above the basic emotional level and the freedom this will give you to consciously control your business instead of following your emotions will see only positive progress in the long run.
If ever in doubt, just remember to ask yourself 'will this decision help me reach my end goal or is there a more emotive driven factor?' and always tell yourself 'it's really not personal'.
James Crow is the Auckland-based entrepreneur behind Pot of Gold skin balm. He blogs about life as a startup entrepreneur each week for Unlimited.