When Steve Douglass became the chairman and CEO for the Payless ShoeSource Co., the company had just been spun off of the May Department Stores Co. He no longer had the corporate structure that had been a part of the larger organization, and now he was the leader for the whole shoe company.
“What I learned at that point is that I needed to stop being the best manager of a company … and I had to then become a leader,” he says. “It’s a very different set of skills, and it’s a very different approach that you have to take to becoming successful. … When you operate as a manager of a big company, you kind of operate as a funnel and a lot of decisions stop at your door. Almost all of the decisions get to that choke point. When you become a leader, that funnel becomes exactly upside down, so that you start having decisions being made at other layers within your organization.”
Douglass now runs ActionCOACH Solutions with his wife, Andraea. Smart Business spoke with him about how to become a better leader.
What are the keys to successfully leading a business?
The foundation for a business owner is to have a mastery around four areas for having the foundation for having a successful business: destination, which is about planning or goal setting where they want to take the business. It’s around money mastery, it’s around time mastery, and then delivery mastery and what we mean there is the consistency which the business delivers its service or product.
Going to the first part, what’s the key to good planning and goal setting?
The first thing for a small business owner is to set goals and an understanding of what they really want from the business. So we start with a business owner and ask them, ‘What do you really want from the business?’ And that can be very serious things about, ‘I want to grow this to be a $25 million business,’ or it can be, ‘By the time I get to be a certain age, I want a second house in Southern California,’ or something more material. In any case, whatever that is, it’s OK if that’s what you want, say five years from now, because we try to start with a five year horizon. Then how do we back that down to ‘how do we get started?’ So we go down to a three-year horizon, and then we bring it back to year one.
Typically, what we will say to a business owner is, ‘So in order for you to achieve some of those personal kinds of things, you need to start a new bank account,’ which we call your profit account, and the owner needs to make deposits in that profit account in order to achieve the kinds of end results that they’re looking for. We teach them how to begin managing their business in a way that allows them to make deposits in that profit account. The destination mastery is really about the setting personal and professional goals.
