Leadership is key to franchising success. But in my experience, many franchisors expect others – including both franchisees and internal team members – to step into poorly defined leadership roles. Leadership is a slippery concept. If you ask 100 people to define leadership, you’ll get 100 different answers!
So to be a good leader, you must first understand what leadership means to you as an individual. Beyond that, it’s also important to consider what your followers need from you. Do they need support? Do they need tough love and accountability? These needs may change from day to day.
We all have our own preferred leadership style, so different people become better leaders under different circumstances.
Humanistic Leadership
My preferred leadership style could be described as ‘humanistic.’ I’m most comfortable empowering others. I align with what I would describe as ‘servant leadership,’ and believe that my role as a leader is to serve others.
At the same time, I know that not everybody thinks like me. When we think about what our franchisees need, sometimes they need to be inspired. But in other moments they might need a high degree of empathy to help them navigate specific challenges or setbacks. Sometimes they might need tough love and to be held accountable!
Adopting a Flexible Approach
Good leadership requires you to understand your strengths and allow for flexibility. This often comes down to a degree of emotional intelligence and presence from moment to moment. You need to foster the ability to see and feel what is happening around you and adapt accordingly.
Not all leaders have this flexibility. Winston Churchill for instance was a great orator and wartime leader; he saw what was happening in Germany much earlier than the general establishment. But afterward, he proved to be a subpar post-war leader.
When circumstances significantly change you may need different people in your franchise business to step up. There is no shame in stepping down from a leadership role when your approach no longer fits the situation.
All of this begins with self-awareness about your strengths, personality, and preferred leadership style. Alongside this, you must avoid building a leadership team of like-minded individuals. There needs to be a mix of characters and personalities! Disagreements and debate are healthy, to an extent.
The public perception is that leadership is a demanding, direct, autocratic role. But in franchising, autocratic leadership can often be a recipe for trouble.
Successful franchising always comes down to people and relationships. Your required style also depends on where you are in the franchise life cycle, because challenges evolve as a franchise business grows. The challenges and pressures when you have ten franchisees are different to when you have 200 franchisees, perhaps spread internationally. As your franchise business grows, you’ll need to accommodate a wider range of personalities, so leading in an autocratic way works less the more you scale.
Anyone in a leadership role needs to clearly understand their responsibilities. Good leaders also need support, coaching, and training. A good leader will often be supported by a good mentor, so developing a mentoring programme within your franchise business can help to nurture up and coming leaders.
Support for a leader can come from above the leader or below. For those who are following, the same humanistic principles apply. There needs to be a high degree of empathy and compassion from both parties. When things go wrong, it’s easy for us as humans to judge. In many ways, it’s easier and faster to take someone down than support them!
As Stephen Covey discusses in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you should seek first to understand, then to be understood. How often do we not do that? How often do we just jump in and create more friction, creating an environment where one party doesn’t feel heard? ‘Not being heard’ is perhaps the biggest complaint I’ve heard from disgruntled franchisees over my career.
I didn’t create Franchology to tell you what to do as a leader. Franchology exists to provide the tools of empathy and self-awareness so you can improve as a leader and work together with your followers. In the furor of everything that is going on within a franchise business, this is easier said than done! Nonetheless, this is work well worth doing.
Love and Honesty
When I think of the best leaders I’ve worked with, the words that come up for me are ‘love’ and ‘honesty.’ In many leadership roles, honesty is seemingly not allowed when it might portray either the leader or the organisation in a negative light! I believe this is deeply unhelpful.
As humans, we always have a limited vision of what is going on. There will often be big questions we don’t immediately know the answer to. Sometimes it’s best to stop and say, “Wait a minute, I don’t know.” Being open about the things you don’t know is not a weakness; I genuinely believe it’s a strength. It sends a message to whoever is listening because it says it’s okay not to know. For other people, this can be hugely empowering. A common pitfall of leadership is that leaders think they need to know all the answers.
In two decades in franchising, every success I’ve had has always been down to my ability to get the best out of the team. As a leader, you’re looking to empower people to do things, but you’re still taking responsibility for the outcome.
I’ve found that having a strong desire to empower others and draw on other people’s strengths can help you through challenging times. Sometimes you have to accept that other people will do things differently – and quite often better. Humanistic leadership can go hand in hand with innovation, if you let it.
Empowerment, Not Abdication
Having said that, I’ve witnessed many instances over the years where people just abdicate responsibility. Usually, they’re not clear enough with whoever they are allegedly empowering. They’re not checking back in regularly enough to make sure that things have been fully understood.
The process can be as simple as saying, “Can you just replay back to me what you’ve heard and what you’ve taken from that?” From a leadership perspective, that simple step is about taking responsibility to ensure the other person understands. You’re checking comprehension, not micromanaging people.
For people with micromanagement tendencies, this approach can feel scary. Once you let the shackles off, it could all go pear-shaped. There’s a strong temptation to step in but doing so is a leadership pitfall.
I once worked with a (very busy, stressed-out) client who stepped in to solve every problem. Eventually, the people under him relied on him for every decision. Growth cannot happen in such an environment; it’s neither inspirational nor motivational.
Humans are hardwired to solve problems and overcome challenges. Doing so builds confidence, enjoyment, and joy in the process. Remove these elements and you get people who just show up for the paycheck and do what they are told. This is far from what is possible with empowerment and servant leadership!
Consider Steve Jobs for a moment. Jobs was known for making highly unreasonable demands of his product teams, but these high standards set the bar high. Apple products wouldn’t be what they are today without both the challenges and the empowered environment.
After all, why would you hire high-quality people and then dictate their every move? The same principle applies to franchise partners. If you’re bringing on the best franchise partners, you provide them with the model and tools for success; but to a degree you can leave them to go about it. Franchising allows individuals to bring their unique qualities to their work, provided it aligns with your brand’s rules of engagement.
This comes back to clarity of purpose and ensuring everyone knows the direction in which you’re heading.
In my next article, we’ll look at how empowered franchisees can nearly always make decisions that align with your purpose.
—
The Franchology® purpose statement is ‘transforming franchising together’. I honestly believe that Franchisors who are driven by purpose, have an amazing opportunity to make Franchising the number one growth strategy globally!
If you feel inspired to be part of that exciting journey, I would love to hear from you, so please get in touch here to arrange a no-obligation coffee and a chat.
