Why Identifying Single Points of Failure Can Help Grow Your Business

As business leaders, we are constantly striving to stay flexible. It’s crucial to adapt to the changes we see in our marketplace, the shifting culture of our companies, and the rapid-fire nature of technological advancement. And yet, many of us admit to having features of our business that we couldn’t live without.

A single point of failure in business is a person or resource with an outsized responsibility for holding your business together. If that single point were to change or disappear, that absence would present a significant risk to your survival.

What if the single point of failure is you?

How do we identify the single points of failure in our businesses? If you’re looking around and not seeing any, the single point of failure might be you.

Leaders, especially solo leaders and founders who have grown a business from the ground up as a passion project, are very likely to be irreplaceable. A founder may be super involved in the day-to-day running of their company in the early days, and as that company grows, the hours they need to spend on those operations increase. By the time you’ve gained proof of concept, found clients, and gotten predictable results, you may be working a 60- or even 80-hour week. But when a leader is too relevant to the internal workings of their business, they risk hindering growth instead of stoking it.

Removing single points of failure – or bolstering other roles and resources to lower risk – can be a vital business move. If the whole business is tied to one person and that person can't perform their job duties, the growth of the business can grind to a halt. While leading with such single-mindedness may seem energetic and passionate, it can also lead to complacency – leaders can stop collaborating, stop trusting, and lack the energy to innovate. Over-important leaders can also get in their team members’ way and keep them from growing alongside the business as they try out new roles and responsibilities.

So, how can you get out of your company’s way?

The key for leaders who feel too indispensable is to empower employees and create systems and processes that aren’t cookie-cutter solutions. Here's how.

1. Regain your time.

The danger of burnout is that 60 hours becomes 70 hours which becomes 80 hours, and no leader with that level of stress should be able to make creative and collaborative business decisions. Before you can implement any strategies to remove and avoid single points of failure, you should carve out some time.

 Eliminating a single point of failure doesn’t have to exile you as a leader.

How could you take your jam-packed work week and save time to focus on your business from a bird’s eye view? Leaders can get stuck in the thought that there is no extra time available in their week, but try to start by logging your time and looking at the actual data. Chances are there may be somewhere you can automate, reduce repetition, delegate, or eliminate tasks to free up hours.

2. Systemize and standardize.

The more dependable and secure your systems are, the less critical you will be as a leader. Try to start turning the parts of your business into standardized procedures so that others can join, follow, and adapt the business without everything falling apart.

For many companies, processes can be more customizable, with every project starting from scratch. But even highly bespoke businesses can make their underlying systems more predictable. Consider standardizing the universal processes, like accounting and messaging, and you can free up your team to focus more energy on the more personal, custom aspects.

3. Let go of absolute control.

It can be difficult for leaders to let their grip relax. For many leaders, control means ensuring the business succeeds and crafting it into your overall vision. But people forget that the goal of growth for a business is also to function without you, for employees to be able to take up their own positions of influence, and for newcomers to see themselves in the vision, too.

There's a difference between being in charge and being in control. Whereas being in control infers that you don't trust the people on your team to do the work correctly, being in charge means you're sharing your company vision with your colleagues and inspiring everyone to reach shared goals. When everyone is rowing in the same direction, it's a lot easier to get to the destination than when you're the only one with the oars.

By letting go of control, carving out time away from burnout, and learning how to standardize your business systems to give them to other people, you can get closer to your vision rather than further away. Eliminating a single point of failure doesn’t have to exile you as a leader; in fact, it could give you the time and headspace you need to re-energize your sense of purpose and find creative opportunities for new growth.

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