Manager versus Leader

Business owners - are you a manager or a leader?

Knowing whether you are more a leader or more of a manager will help one gain insight and self -confidence in dealing with others and running your own business.

Managers are good at maintaining the status quo and adding stability and order. However they may not be good at instigating change and envisioning the future. Leaders, on the other hand, are good at stirring people's emotions, raising their expectations, and taking them in new directions. Leaders, however , may tend to be self-absorbed and pre-occupied.

As a business owner, you need to develop both sets of skills - leadership and management skills, whether they come naturally or not. Know where the gaps in your skill-sets, and acquire those that you lack.

The definite strengths and weaknesses of both types of individuals - managers and leaders, can be summarised below:

Managers
- emphasis rationality and control
- problem solvers (focus on goals,resources, organisation structure, people)
- persistent, tough-minded, hard working, analytical, tolerant,
- adopt an impersonal & passive attitude toward goals
- decide upon goals based on necessity instead of desire
- tend to be reactive
- views work as enabling process
- establish strategies and make decisions by combining people and ideas
- good at reaching compromises and mediating conflicts
- tolerate practical, mundane work because of strong survival instinct
- risk-averse
- prefers working with others
- focus on how things get done
- may be viewed as inscrutable, detached, and manipulative
- perpetuate and strengthen existing balance of social relations

Leaders
- perceived as brilliant but sometimes lonely
- control themselves before they try to control others
- can visualise a purpose, and generate value in work
- imaginative, passionate, non conforming risk-takers
- shape ideas instead of responding to them
- have personal orientation towards goals
- provide a vision that alters the way people think about what is desirable, possible and necessary
- develop new approaches to long-standing problems
- use their vision to excite people and then only develop choices
- focus people on shared ideals and raise their expectations
- strong dislike of mundane work
- relate to people in intuitive, empathetic way
- create systems where human relations may be turbulent, intense and at times disorganised
- continual struggle to find some sense of order
- do not take things for granted and are not satisfied with the status quo
- seek and support opportunities for change ( technological, political, ideological)


Read the entire article Managing versus leading

Logoworks Small Business & Home Business Newsletter

Tracking profit centres in MYOB

How to track the performance of each of your profit centres in MYOB.

MYOB uses the terminology 'Jobs' to help you group transactions belonging to various profit centres. You need to setup a 'Job Code' to represent a profit centre. Once you've created the Job Number, you can then allocate the transaction to each Job Number. Subsequently, you can use Job Reports to preview/print a report of the activities of each profit centre.

And in case you suffer from memory lapses once in a while, you can get MYOB software to remind you to allocate the Job Number to a transaction. You can also run an exception report designed to readily identify transactions that have not been allocated a job.

Cool?

Strong proponent of Doing Things Once Only

When is a good time to computerise my accounting records

If you ask me, I will say, computerise your accounting records as soon as you start your business.

As business owner myself, I am aware that starting a new business is stressful - and it stretches ones' resources - time and money. There is a tendency to put buying a computerised accounting system the last priority.

However, having implemented MYOB Accounting software for more than 300 businesses at different stages of the business life cycle, I have enough evidence to conclude that companies which implement a system right at the start of the business have less stress on the resources than otherwise thought.

Yes, its true there is less invoices and expenses to account for in the beginning, and there is the uncertainty of when the first sale will come. But you started your business not to fail, so the customers will come. And when the customers come, there will be an avalanche, and then you might find there is a bottleneck in invoicing, collection and inventory recording. And the delay in getting the information (for example, amounts owing) will cause an un-necessarily strain in the resources.

One new convert to the MYOB computerised accounting system tells me that his staff takes 6 days to prepare the customer statements for 100 customers. This client delivers perishable stocks to the hotel industry on a daily basis (or at worst once a week). The handwritten delivery note serves as an invoice. The staff enters the details of invoice (invoice number and amount) onto an excel worksheet for every of the 100-odd customers. The spreadsheet is updated whenever the customer makes a payment. The entire process of preparing a customer statement the manual way takes some 6 days (including overtime hours clocked in). On top of that, they are not able to tell how much stock in total have been sold, and at what profit margins.

The other disadvantage of waiting too long before you invest in a computerised software is that you lose valuable historical sales data. This client is only able to spare the staff and time to enter transactions for the new year 2008 onwards. For the past year 2007, they will have to farm it out to an outsourced bookkeeping services to prepare the final accounts. This incurs some more costs, which could be avoided had they invested in the computer program since the beginning.

If you are starting a new business, do set aside some funds for the accounting system. The accounting system is a necessary tool in your business, far greater than any renovation that you intend to put up for the new office. Prioritise your needs and wants.