entrepreneurship Archives • Outliers Academy

by Victor G. Snyder

As the leader of a small business, you’re bent on driving growth. You are willing to put in the work that’s needed to achieve that, but paradoxically, working too hard could create unexpected obstacles to your business growth.

If you’re working hard and putting in long hours but your business has hit a plateau, it’s possible that your hard work is the problem.

Here are some of the ways that working too hard could be holding your business back from realizing its growth potential.

Working Too Hard Stops You from Delegating Effectively

When you work too hard, you end up micromanaging your own employees. This undermines their dedication to the business and sends a silent message that you don’t trust them to meet your expectations. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, generating resentment and an unhealthy work atmosphere.

“As a CEO and Entrepreneur, your success will directly correlate to how well you can assemble the best team and then bring out the best in those people,” notes Mark Moses, the CEO of CEO Coaching International. “Micromanagers should never be CEOs of large or growing companies. This is because they are simply too complex to micromanage. Being involved at every level and not delegating to your team creates a bottleneck that essentially strangles an organization.”

Indeed, in order for your business to really scale, you need talented employees who are experts in their areas of specialty. If you’re working too hard, you are probably carrying out tasks which don’t draw on your real strengths. When you hire experts, they can carry out the work in less time, thanks to their training and experience, and you can free yourself up to focus on those strategic tasks which no one else can do.

Working Too Hard Stops You From Building Scalable Business Systems

No matter how hard you work, there is a limit to what a single person can achieve. For a business to scale successfully, it needs to be based on smart systems that can expand beyond your own capabilities. When you focus on completing task after task at all costs, instead of building a scalable business process that will do it for you, you’re stunting your business growth.

“Yes, your talents and skills were the reason that it was able to get up and running, but they will not be the tools that allow it to reach future success,” says Ken Marshall, founder of Doorbell Digital Marketing. “Now don’t get me wrong, working hard and getting things done is not an inherently bad thing. In fact, when your company is in its infancy, you’re going to be doing most of the work. But at some point, you’re going to have to figure out ways to remove yourself from all of the repetitive or non-essential tasks, take a step back, and look at where the ship is headed.”

Working too hard can create an overdependence on you. If your employees are constantly interrupting you to ask for decisions that they should be capable of reaching on their own, it prevents you from focusing on your more important core responsibilities and holds them back from potential growth in their own roles.

Working Too Hard Prevents You from Thinking Creatively

For your business to scale, you need to feel passionate about it. But when you work too hard, your drive and passion get drowned out by petty tasks that should be delegated to someone else.

You could end up focusing too narrowly on the minutiae of the business, making it difficult to see the big picture and create an effective business strategy. At the same time, rushing so fast from one task to the next prevents you from focusing fully on any one aspect of the business, which will also prevent you from maintaining perspective with a holistic growth plan.

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by Todd Henry

To develop your authentic voice, you must cultivate three things: a strong sense of identity, which means doing work that is rooted in something substantive and personally meaningful; a consonant vision for your work, meaning a sense of the ultimate impact you want to have; and mastery of your skills and platform.

A strong, authentic, compelling voice is the expression of identity, guided by vision, and achieved through mastery. These three work together as a part of the lifelong process of growth and discovery. Developing your authentic voice is the result of lifelong layers of learning, experimentation, and failure.

While it’s possible to piece it all together over time through trial and error, I want to help you accelerate the process by building practices around each of these three core drivers.

1. Identity

Identity is primarily defined by the question “Who are you?” If I informally ask you that question, there are a number of ways you could respond. You could tell me about your childhood experiences, your job, your hobbies, your political views, or any number of other defining characteristics.

However you respond, it would be a story about how you perceive yourself and your place in the world.

In fact, your sense of identity is a collection of these stories. Whether the stories are true or false is somewhat irrelevant, because it’s whether or not you believe them that defines how you behave.

Regardless of what you profess to believe, your actions reveal the truth. When you act in a manner that’s inconsistent with your true aptitudes and passions, it can create frustration, and over time can lead to a sense that you’re not living up to your creative potential.

Thus self-knowledge is a critical ingredient of identity because when it is lacking you are more likely to compromise your true thoughts and beliefs. This is especially true when you are under pressure to deliver results.

You must have a rooted understanding of why your work matters to you, what makes it unique, and why you believe it should also matter to others.

I can often tell when someone is having an identity crisis, because the person will communicate in one of two ways: broadly, so as not to offend anyone; or so specifically and reactively (in order to appear confident) that he or she self-contradicts when the winds of public opinion grow unfavorable to the previous stance.

Your work must be rooted in something of substance so that you don’t blow with the winds of change or challenge.

2. Vision

The second part of the voice engine is vision, which is primarily defined by the question “Where are you going?” If you set out to build a bridge between two points on a river, you’d better first determine

The purpose of the bridge and the kinds of vehicles that will be crossing it
Whether you have sufficient resources and materials to complete the project
Whether or not a bridge is even the right solution to the problem of crossing the river

To apply this metaphor to your work, it’s important that you be able to articulate the kind of effect you wish to have, and how you want the world to be different through your efforts. You should at least have a sense of how you wish to connect with an intended audience, and how you plan to impact them.

Though you don’t want to become paralyzed with inaction out of fear of getting it wrong, your vision provides you with a set of guiding principles to help you stay aligned and measure your progress.

Many people falsely believe that brilliant contributors just follow their whims and let their “gut” decide from moment to moment where their work will lead them, but this is largely untrue. Though they rarely have all of their steps mapped out, the majority of the great creators and teams I’ve encountered at least have some sense of where their work is leading and the ultimate impact they want to have.

They have a “north pole” toward which to navigate, even if only in a general sense. This vision is what guides their efforts as they continue to refine and develop their voice.

3. Mastery

The final piece of the voice engine is mastery, which is defined by the question “How will you get there?”

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