Control and Responsibility
Two errors tend to run at the same time in the same owner. The first is trying to control things that can only be influenced: how people feel, what a client decides, what the market does. The second is quietly handing off responsibility for things that are entirely theirs, such as who they hired, what they tolerate and whether anybody knows the numbers.
Both are expensive, and they compound each other. Effort goes where it cannot work, and does not go where it would.
What the model is
Three rings. The idea of the outer two comes from Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Adding an inner ring for what you genuinely control makes it more useful to an owner, because the difference between control and influence is where most management mistakes are made.
Control is short: your next action, your standards, your diary, your prices, who you employ, what you tolerate, how you respond to bad news. Influence is larger: how your team behaves, whether a client renews, your reputation, what suppliers do for you. Concern is everything else, and it is enormous: interest rates, energy costs, what a competitor charges, the weather, what HMRC decides.
The awkward part is that responsibility does not stop at the edge of control. As the owner you are responsible for outcomes across both inner rings, including things you cannot command. Nobody else in the business carries that, which is precisely what you are paid for.
Why it matters to an owner
The first reason is energy. Time spent in the outer ring produces nothing but fatigue and a well-informed sense of grievance. Worse, it is contagious. An owner who narrates the economy at the Monday meeting has just given the whole team permission to explain their numbers with the news, and that permission is very hard to withdraw later.
The second is that the rings move. Consistent action inside the control ring expands the influence ring, which is Covey's point and it holds up. Do what you said, publish the numbers, keep the standard, and over a couple of years your influence over customers, staff and suppliers grows. Spend the same period complaining about things you cannot change and it shrinks, because people quietly stop treating you as the person who decides things.
The third is the responsibility half, and it is the one owners dislike. "The team is not motivated" is a statement about you. You hired them, you set the structure, you decided what gets rewarded and what gets ignored. That is not about blame. It is that only one reading of the sentence gives you anything to do on Monday.
A worked example
Illustrative. Take a £2.4m manufacturer. Energy costs jump, and the largest customer, at 22 per cent of turnover, cuts orders by 30 per cent following a procurement decision made two levels above anyone the owner has ever met. That is roughly £158,000 of revenue gone.
Autumn goes on industry forums, trade press and a lot of conversations about how nobody can plan in this climate. All of it is true, and all of it sits in the outer ring. Meanwhile the quarter passes.
Split it properly. Concern: energy prices and that procurement decision. Influence: the relationship with the customer at the level he can actually reach, the other forty accounts, the productivity of the team. Control: the price list, quote turnaround, overhead, how many proactive calls get made each week, and who makes them.
Eight weeks of control-ring work looks like this, illustratively. A 4 per cent rise across the remaining book of roughly £1.87m is about £75,000, most of it margin. Twenty target accounts contacted weekly by someone whose job that now is. An overhead review that finds, say, £30,000 of spend nobody would defend if asked. None of that recovers the lost contract, and together it covers a large part of the hole.
The same owner, same market, same bad news. The difference is entirely in which ring the autumn was spent in.
How to apply it this week
- Write last month's worries into three columns. Control, influence, concern. Be strict. "Whether they take it seriously" is influence, not control, however much you would like it to be otherwise.
- Count the hours. Roughly, how much of your thinking time went to the outer column? Owners who do this honestly are usually annoyed by the answer, which is the point.
- Convert each concern into the nearest controllable action. Energy prices are a concern. Getting three quotes, changing the shift pattern and repricing the affected products are control. There is nearly always a control-ring version, and it is usually duller than the worry.
- Audit your language for a week. Count how often you say "we can't because" against "I've decided". Your team is copying whichever one they hear more, and one of them is a business strategy.
- Take one problem you have been describing as external. Write your part in it in one paragraph, starting with what you decided, hired or tolerated that helped create it. Not for guilt. For the list of actions that falls out of it.
- Box the outer ring. Give the news, the forums and the market chat a defined slot rather than a permanent background presence. You still need to know what is happening. You do not need it in your head all day.
The mistake most owners make
The commonest mistake is using "it is outside my control" as an exit from responsibility. It is true that you cannot control a customer's decision. You are still responsible for the concentration risk that made one customer 22 per cent of turnover, and that was a control-ring decision you made over several years without noticing you were making it.
The opposite mistake is trying to control what you can only influence, which is mostly people. You cannot control attitude, motivation or commitment. Attempting it produces compliance, which looks like agreement in the room and disappears the moment you leave. What you control is the conditions: who is here, what is expected, what gets measured, what happens when the standard is missed. Get those right and the attitude usually follows. Try to command the attitude directly and you get neither.
The third is assuming influence is free. It is earned by a track record inside the control ring, which is why a new manager has less of it than they expect and why an owner who has changed the strategy three times in two years has less than they think.
The questions to sit with
- Out of 10, how much of last week's thinking time was spent on things you can actually do something about?
- What are you currently describing as bad luck or bad market, and what is your part in it?
- Which person or outcome are you trying to control, when the honest position is that you can only influence it?
- If you accepted full responsibility for the thing that annoys you most about the business, what would you have to do this month?
This runs underneath Owner Foundations and shows up directly in the Three Freedoms, particularly freedom of mind. Owners who live in the outer ring are exhausted by things they were never going to change. Owners who work the inner two are usually calmer, and they are certainly further forward.
