There’s a simple truth in business (whether you own one or not)…if you irreplaceable, you’re not promotable. As a small business owner, you need to be working your way up your own organization until you can truly step back and act as a  shareholder.

I once had a guy working for me that ran our company’s technical support desk. He’s an extremely smart guy and he put in a boatload of hours taking care of customer calls day and night. These are complex problems of the sort that shut a company’s operations if they don’t get resolved. Corrupt databases. Broken servers. You get the idea. There was nothing this guy couldn’t solve.

Doesn’t this sound like a guy ripe for a promotion? Well, no. Unfortunately, there was one major hurdle to that…it all fell apart when he wasn’t there.

He had failed to create systems and procedures that allowed his subordinates to function properly if he wasn’t there to facilitate everything. Now, I know what you might be thinking…his subordinates weren’t properly trained or lacked the necessary skills. Well, that could be the case, but in this instance, it wasn’t. His team was highly qualified and very talented.

His team lacked a set of rules. A system for making decisions without him. Very few things were documented and little was systematized.

So, if this is the holy grail, how do you achieve it?

Make an organizational chart as if you were a much larger organization.

A lot of people look at this and think, this is silly! Trust me, it’s not. The support department in my example consisted of the manager and two employees.

The point of the exercise is to make sure that you capture all of the job functions that everyone is explicitly fulfilling. Remove the individual talents of the people and break it down into what skills have to be there for the operation to function.

In our case, we needed a database administrator, a couple of different kinds of hardware experts, an application specialist, a programmer and a QA engineer.

Until you commit it to paper, you wont get your head around all of the different roles and responsibilities that need to be fulfilled to make your operation run smoothly.

Write detailed job descriptions of each position

Why do this? Simple! If you are the only one that can perform certain functions on your new org chart then you need to understand exactly what it is that you need to train someone else to do or what kind of qualifications you’re looking for in your next hiring cycle. Try to be as precise and detailed as possible.

Evaluate where you currently “play” and make a plan to work yourself “up” your org chart

Looking at your org chart and job descriptions, go through and determine which jobs that “only you can do” at the moment. Many times, this exercise is very eye opening to people. You’ll probably find that you “play” at many different roles and many different levels of the organization.

So how do you get out of the mess?

You start at the bottom and work your way up. You work to put each level on auto-pilot. You do that by: hiring, training, documenting and automating.

Remember, just because you can do something does not mean that you’re the best person to do it.

At each level, make detailed documentation about workflow, decisions and reports.

How do you systematize each level as you’re working your way up this new org chart? That depends. I mentioned a few ways, but there’s an order to it:

1. Document - flowchart the job. Write detailed daily, weekly and monthly recurring task lists. As many decisions as can be documented ahead of time, document them. Now some parts of the job wont be feasible to plan out ahead of time to cover every possible situation that can come up. Sometimes the job requires a bit of latitude on the employees part. That’s fine. In those instances, provide them with an over-arching goal. For my support desk, the over-arching goal I gave them was: prevent the support call from needing to be made in the fist place. If there’s no pre-determined course of action, then check your decisions against the over-arching goal.
2. Automate - now that you’ve got it documented…can you automate it? Is there any way to put hardware and software to work for you? You may not be able to automate the whole thing, but look at how different steps could be eliminated with smarter systems.
3. Train - if you’ve already got the staff, then train them on what you’ve documented that can’t be automated.
4. Hire - if you can’t automate, you can’t train (either due to lack of ability or lack of personnel), then hire…and now you know exactly what you need.

Welcome back again!