I once spent months finding leads for a salesperson whose actual job was finding leads.
In financial services you’re a hunter or you’re a gatherer. Hunters bring new business in. Gatherers look after what’s already through the door, and plenty of them are excellent at it, but they don’t grow the book. The hunters make the money.
This person was a gatherer, and that was obvious inside the first month. So instead of saying it, I hunted for them. I passed over opportunities I’d generated, opened doors, handed across introductions I’d made myself. Their numbers held up, which was the entire problem.
I told myself I was supporting someone who needed a hand. What I was actually doing was avoiding one uncomfortable conversation, and I avoided it for months by quietly doing their job on top of my own. It achieved nothing that lasted. They never learned to hunt, because I never let them find out what it felt like not to have.
Everyone else on that team could see it. So what they learned from me was that the standard was negotiable, and that if you struggled quietly enough for long enough, I’d pick it up for you.
That’s what leadership looks like in a small business. It starts with vision. It lives or dies on the conversation you’ve been putting off since March.
Vision, then standards, then the conversation
Vision comes first. It isn’t optional and it isn’t decoration. You decide where this business is going and nobody else in it can do that for you. Without it you aren’t leading, you’re reacting quickly and calling it agility.
Where the leadership genre goes wrong is stopping there. Embody your values. Walk your talk. Lead with authenticity. Try acting on any of that tomorrow morning. You can’t, because it’s a mood rather than an instruction.
Vision does a specific operational job. It tells you where you’re going, which tells you what good looks like, which is exactly what a standard is. A standard is your vision made concrete enough for somebody else to meet.
So the sequence runs: decide the vision, turn it into standards specific enough to be met or missed, tell people what they are out loud, notice when they aren’t met, address it directly with the person, and carry the risk either way. The first two are thinking work and most women I coach are good at them. It’s the rest that gets skipped, and it’s all the same conversation.
Consistency is your true north
Setting a standard once is easy. Holding it on a Wednesday, when you’re tired and behind and the person who missed it is the one you like best, is the actual job.
Your vision and your standards don’t move because you’re busy, because the client is difficult, or because you’ve had a rough fortnight. The moment they do move, your team stops navigating by them and starts navigating by you instead. Reading your mood. Working out which version of you turned up today.
Lack of consistency creates confusion, and confusion creates calamity. Things go wrong that nobody flagged, because nobody was sure whether flagging it was welcome this week. People stop deciding and wait for you, so everything routes back through you, which is the exact bottleneck you started a business to get away from. And the good ones leave, because capable people won’t work somewhere the goalposts move.
Hold the line when it’s inconvenient and something useful happens. People stop guessing and get on with it, because the standard is doing the managing instead of you.
Why this is harder for you than it was for your old boss
Your team is compact, so there’s nowhere for a difficult conversation to hide. You probably found half of them through someone you know. You can’t replace anyone next week, because you don’t have a recruitment function, you have a Tuesday. And you often actually like them, which is not a weakness, but it does make the sentence harder to say. On top of that you’re the whole hierarchy. No HR to sit in, no manager to escalate to, no policy to hide behind.
So you do what I did. You wait, you give it another month, and mostly you don’t even wait passively. You compensate. You pick up the piece they’re not doing, quietly, at night, and tell yourself that’s easier.
It is easier, for about a fortnight. Then you’ve moved the cost onto your own evenings, moved it from this month to the rest of the year, and taught the person that the gap is yours to fill.
What the conversation actually looks like
It’s shorter than you think and it isn’t a confrontation.
Name the specific thing, not the person. Reports have been late four of the last six weeks, rather than you’ve been unreliable lately.
Say what the standard is, out loud, in plain words. Reports land Thursday by five.
Ask what’s going on, then stop talking and listen, because a good share of the time there’s a real reason and you’re about to solve a different problem than the one you walked in with.
Agree what happens next and when you’ll check. Then actually check, because the follow-up is where most of these fall over.
Fifteen minutes. The dread is reliably worse than the conversation, and the conversation is reliably worse than the version you’d have had in March.
Hire slow, fire fast
If you employ people, moving an unsuitable staff member out is laborious and it can be costly. It’s nothing like the version in your head where you have a chat and they move on. That’s why I coach hire slow, fire fast.
Under the Fair Work Act, if you have fewer than fifteen employees you’re a small business, and your people can’t lodge an unfair dismissal claim in their first twelve months. For larger employers it’s six. That window is the most valuable thing you have, and most owners spend it hoping things will improve on their own.
After that, the Small Business Fair Dismissal Code is your protection. Follow it and the Fair Work Commission must dismiss an unfair dismissal application. And for performance-based dismissals, the Code requires that you warned the person their performance wasn’t meeting expectations and gave them a chance to fix it.
Read that again. The conversation you’ve been avoiding is the documentation.
So hire slow. Take the extra week, check the references, run a trial project. Getting it wrong is expensive now in a way it never was when someone else carried the risk. And fire fast, meaning deal with it early rather than act rashly. Dragging it out costs you money, costs your team, and is considerably unkinder to the person than a clean conversation a year earlier would have been.
One caveat. I’m a business coach and a former financial adviser, not an employment lawyer. Contractors, casuals and employees sit under different rules. Before you dismiss anyone, get proper HR or legal advice. That cost is trivial next to the cost of getting it wrong.
This is measurable, not soft
Fred Kiel spent seven years on this for Return on Character, interviewing 84 CEOs and their executive teams and surveying around 8,600 employees. The CEOs rated highest on character by their own people delivered 9.35 per cent return on assets. The lowest-rated delivered 1.93 per cent. Four habits separated them: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion.
That’s Fortune 500 data and you’re not a Fortune 500, so anyone quoting you a 5x return on your personal character is selling something. What carries across is the mechanism. Responsibility and compassion showed up there as the same trait, not opposite ones. The leaders who held the standard were the ones dealing with people honestly, early, and without blame.
Where to start this week
You already know who it is. You thought of them somewhere in the third paragraph.
Write down the specific behaviour in one sentence, with an example and a date. Write down the standard in one sentence. Book fifteen minutes. Don’t do it by email and don’t bundle it into a catch-up about something else.
It’s one skill and it scales. If you can’t tell a contractor their work has slipped, you won’t tell a major client their behaviour towards your team isn’t acceptable either.
Standards you don’t enforce aren’t standards. They’re preferences, and your team worked that out a long time ago.
If you’re the kind of woman other people already come to for this, and you want to build a business out of it, our certification pathway teaches the methodology and the commercial structure behind a coaching practice. Become a Fempire Certified Coach.
As the owner of Fempire and founder of Trudy Heins Business Coaching, The Holistic Health Hive, and Woman Friday, Trudy’s mission is to help women create strong, strategic, and financially resilient businesses, the kind that support the life you really want.
With over 36 years in business and finance including 30 years as a Certified Financial Planner. Trudy has built and sold multiple businesses, led high-performing national sales teams, and coached hundreds of women to achieve lasting success.
She knows what it takes to go from idea to income and from coach to company owner.
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