Over the years I’ve seen too many leaders spend too much time working in their business rather than on their business. This is a serious problem. The real job of a leader is to work on the business—to define strategy, drive growth, and get the company to the next level. You need to spend your valuable time setting goals, tracking progress, making big-picture decisions, and building relationships. You don’t need to be tied up in trenches working on day-to-day operations. These jobs need to be delegated to others.

When a leader gets stuck in the habit of working in the business they quickly create a situation where everything is dependent on them. This limits a company’s growth. No single person, however driven or talented, can do everything! The solution is to put processes, procedures, and systems in place that give others a blueprint to follow. It’s best to shore up these “building blocks” early on in your company’s trajectory. However, no matter how long your company has been in business, it’s not too late to define and shape them—or to revisit the ones you already have in place and make them better.

Standardizing and hardwiring processes and practices lets you create a high-reliability culture. This is something I learned in my healthcare career. High-reliability companies have very little variance, which is critical in life-or-death environments like hospitals. But really, every company should care about reducing variance in their products, services, and leadership. Why? Because it creates consistent experiences for employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders. Most people thrive in a culture of consistency and predictability.

When a company doesn’t have strong structural building blocks in place, expectations are unclear. People don’t truly know what the company stands for and what its goals are (even though leaders may assume they do). They don’t know what their priorities are at any given time, nor do they know how they are being judged on their performance. They don’t know how the company is performing. In fact, they, at times, may feel the company is doing well when it is not. Thus, they misread the bosses’ sense of urgency.

This vagueness can paralyze employees. They feel they can’t make decisions and must always get permission to act. As a result, things get bottlenecked at the top. If the leader isn’t there, things can’t move forward.

Beginning with a strong structural foundation drives decision-making downward because it creates clarity—and clarity is what most people crave. Knowing what the rules are and where the boundaries lie is empowering. It alleviates anxiety and makes it far easier to engage employees. It becomes obvious who is performing and who isn’t and allows for fairness in how people are rewarded and recognized.

Leaders are able to spend less time putting out fires and solving problems and more time strategizing and growing the company. More things can roll on autopilot.

Standardizing and documenting the good practices and systems that create a company’s foundation is the “fix” that heads off many problems that can cause it to struggle or even fail. What’s more, it keeps the culture consistent as a company grows. When you come in and realize that you no longer know everyone in the room, at least you know what everyone in the room believes in regard to the company and their job.

This process might be a bit daunting, so here are a few tips that may help:

• Take time to learn about the structural elements needed to build a strong company. We discuss some of the ones I feel are most important further in the pages of Section 3.
• Think about who you’re creating these systems and procedures for. Sure, you know the company inside and out but your staff may not. Keep your language very simple. Think through every detail. Break down all procedures into small, doable steps. Even if everyone knows it, write it down anyway. Over time, employees will come and go and having procedures documented will help with the transition.
• Ask employees to help. They will appreciate being asked and will bring great value to the process. They probably have ideas for doing things that you never considered.
• Don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself. As you document your processes and procedures you will be forced to look closely at how you’re doing things. You may see that some things you’re doing don’t make sense anymore. You might think of fresh ideas that evolve your business dramatically or take it in a whole new direction.
• When you’re ready to implement new processes, practices, or systems, take one thing at a time. Really get it down pat before moving on to the next one. It is easy for people to be so overwhelmed by too much change too fast that they become stuck in their own quicksand and move nowhere.
• Review your practices and processes regularly. They are never set in stone. They will change as your company grows.

One more note: if you are the founder of your company, be aware that you may have a fundamental dislike of the idea of structure. This is typical of entrepreneurs. But structure is necessary if a company is to grow and thrive. In fact, authors and researchers Chip and Dan Heath say 80 percent of failures are from a lack of clarity. As we discussed earlier, structure brings clarity.

The greatest impediment to a company’s long-term success is a lack of structure. If not put in place, eventually the company founder wears out, employees leave, customer service is inconsistent, and the needed revenue to sustain the company is not achieved. Yes, it takes time to build the foundation. However, a company that wants to achieve long-term success has no choice. Run to structure, not away from it.

Here are some of the key structural elements I recommend every company put in place:

• A mission statement, a vision statement, and identified values
• Clear goals that are communicated to all employees
• “Official” (written) standards of behavior
• A method for measuring the important things
• A leader development system (development for everyone in a supervisory role)
• A well-defined new employee selection process
• A plan for helping employees thrive in the first 90 days
• An employee training and development system
• An evaluation/job performance feedback system
• A way to measure employee engagement and customer satisfaction
• A well-run meeting system
• A way to collect and cascade best practices

In the next 12 chapters we’ll cover each of the structural elements all companies need—brand new ventures, small businesses, and larger companies. No matter where your company is in its journey, make sure these key building blocks are in place as you move ahead.