Personal constraints are strategic constraints.
I am sure that every founder of a business hits the reality of their own circumstances and their own strengths and limitations as they confront the enormity of activity and decision making required in their business.
A founder’s personal circumstances have an impact on decisions on work. Available time, financial circumstances, family and other life commitments, physical health, and even stage of life provide a reality that impacts strategy, risk, growth planning and more.
And that is before a founder’s personal attributes are considered. We are not all built the same. Some are great at sales, some have strength in people leadership, others are wonderful at execution, or processes, or financial diligence.
But recognising what energises you and when the boundaries of your personal strengths and personal circumstances are impacting you and the business is not something that is easily established. It is not an area that simply reading a book or attending a class will provide answers.
Some intuitively know how to leverage their talent and minimise challenges in other areas, others are a little blind in this area. Unfortunately, the knowledge and understanding is fragmented across psychology, leadership studies, behavioural economics, and executive coaching. Getting to the point where you are comfortable in how this can be understood in your decision making can take time and effort.
Identity and values sit at the centre of knowing yourself, but not in an abstract way. For a founder, identity determines what kind of business you are prepared to build and what kind you are not.
Growth, revenue and profit are measurable. Identity less so, yet it is often the stronger driver of behaviour.
Some founders are motivated by independence and autonomy. Others by influence and scale. Some value stability and long-term relationships; others thrive on rapid change and competitive positioning.
Where tension arises is when the business begins to demand behaviours that conflict with identity. A founder who values informality may struggle as governance becomes necessary. A founder who values control or struggles to trust may resist delegation as size increases. A founder who thrives on sales activity may find less satisfaction in the more structured disciplines of financial oversight and leadership development.
Values also determine boundaries. What risks are acceptable? What compromises are tolerable? What client relationships are worth pursuing? These are not purely commercial decisions. They are identity decisions.
If identity and strategy are misaligned, the business becomes less clear over time and the weight of the business grows. Energy declines, decisions are delayed, and avoidance increases.
Clarity of values does not guarantee success. But without it, strategy will often drift toward what is externally rewarded rather than what is known to be sustainable.
There is a philosophy that you should maximise your time on those activities and circumstances that you are good at and that you like and actively limit those tasks that you struggle with and don’t like. Sounds simple, but coming to an understanding of what drives you, what energises you, takes some conscious effort.
There is no suggestion of trying to rework a person to fix supposed weaknesses. But a personal knowledge of the positive attributes of how you operate makes for better decisions. You are less likely to build strategies that don’t maximise your strengths. Only head into a situation, or head down a path, when you know how you are going to offset those areas that are not your strengths.
We often think about risk in terms of long-term strategy or in financial planning for the business. But it is so much more than that. It can also relate to ensuring little tolerance for drifting from company processes, or having little tolerance for slipping compliance activities, or actively protecting the company brand.
Knowing yourself and how you handle certain situations is important. For example, do you need someone working with you that has greater attention to detail? A business founder, like everyone, can be predictably biased in the way they handle certain situations.
The more you know yourself, the more you can understand the conditions under which you will perform well or poorly.
Patterns of avoidance highlight where strategy and behaviour are misaligned. We can all recall decisions that are not done in a timely manner; that require additional effort to execute.
You can reflect on how you compensate for those decisions today. Assuming that complete avoidance is not the answer, how do you get through those decisions? What compromises or paths do you use? It may be that getting a colleague’s assistance is the answer, it may be that an alternate, a compromise, is the answer.
The strategy question is how you will manage this going forward so that there are no artificial limitations on the business. So that progress and scalability are not compromised.
Self-knowledge is not self-indulgence; it is a structural necessity for endurance and for scale.
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