In growing businesses, people have to wear many hats. This is doable when the company is new, smaller, and the volume of work is manageable. But wearing many hats soon becomes inefficient and ineffective. This is true because the volume of work in each hat approaches and even surpasses that of a full time role. It’s also true because switching between hats becomes harder; we are not just going from task to task within one job (which is hard enough) but from context to context across multiple jobs.
In the end, the clients, team, and business-as-a-whole suffer when we wear too many hats. Major signs of that suffering include revenue, profit, and customer-service pressures, overwhelm, an inability to invest, and an inability to grow even if some or all of the people are working hard.
Once we see that are wearing too many hats, we can build a business case for having others take on some of the work.
In your corner,
Mike
Today’s photo credit: Bear Mountain Picnic cc