There’s only so much time in a busy farm owner’s day. Here’s how can you help your farm manager develop their leadership skills, so you can focus on the big stuff.
– April Stewart, CG Associate Editor
Dr. Stephen Brown says: “You are not a leader until you have produced a leader who can produce another leader.” With the current pace of farm succession and expansion, more management leadership development is needed.
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Many farms undergoing transition today are growing larger in terms of complexity, dollars and people under management. Farm managers either need to be developed for these growing operations or they need to be hired.
Farm expansions and diversification are also putting pressure on management skills. Satellite farms are an emerging trend and an opportunity for farms to grow and increase production. Farms, like factories, are scaleable. People, processes and technology that work in one location could work in another. There’s only so much time in your day, but the right capital and people investment has a multiplicative effect, allowing farms to produce more.
Production requires the most labour and is usually the focus of management. But if producers are managing finance, marketing or HR, then external consultants and coaches can be engaged in these areas to take weight off farm owners and allow them to spend more time in areas like production.
Lyndsay Gillon-Seafoot, owner of HR consultancy Curbridge Consulting, says training management successors ideally begins years before the exit. If you’ve been running things for a long time, says Gillon-Seafoot, you owe your successor a long runway of transition support. If this isn’t possible, management coaching and consultants are available.
Gillon-Seafoot knows it’s going to be tough to give up control, so how do you delegate more? She advises the first thing to focus on is your own strong communication. Get good at explaining what “done” looks like. It can be a lifesaver, and explaining the “why” is also important for getting more buy-in.
Julie Zhuo was one of Facebook’s early managers and wrote the book “The Making of a Manager.” According to Zhuo, a manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together. You do this by influencing purpose, people and process. In other words, you influence the why, the who and the how. Zhuo also emphasizes setting expectations early and providing real-time task-specific feedback as well as feedback on behavioural issues.
People will do things differently, says Gillon-Seafoot, but different isn’t always worse. Today’s leaders often want everything to continue being done exactly the way they’d do it, but others have good ideas too. It is a learning curve. Gillon-Seafoot advises being patient with yourself and the person you’re delegating to. You’ll find there will be peace in your life once you start delegating well.
Alternatively, as agricultural operations grow in size, they may need to consider hiring a manager to take some weight off farm owners. How do you know when the time is right? Gillon-Seafoot says you need to ensure you have time to work on your business, and not just in your business.
But where to begin? To use a coaching analogy, you can start by looking down your bench. Or you can tap into free agents and look to hire a manager. Most business owners would prefer to hire someone “shovel ready” but unfortunately much of the world is facing a middle manager crunch.
It’s not necessarily a good idea to make your best farm operator a leader. According to Gillon-Seafoot, some people can be taught skills and manage their way through it. Others, however, have limited skills and hit a leadership ceiling. She suggests that if your plan is to promote new younger leaders and support them, don’t let older employees run them over. Just because you work somewhere, and you’re older, doesn’t qualify you to lead.
How many people can you effectively manage? Approximately seven people is a popular answer, although Elon Musk favours a more horizontal structure with over 20 direct reports at Tesla. Gillon-Seafoot’s opinion is the number of reports comes down to process, bottlenecks and purpose: “Some farms have 6,000 extra processes that bog everyone down and they’re not lean.”
Global consulting leader McKinsey & Co-analyzed thousands of manager jobs and identified five archetypes: player/coach, coach, supervisor, facilitator and co-ordinator. These different management styles affect the ideal number of reports. McKinsey also notes that the number of reports you can effectively manage is affected by time available, process standardization, work variety and team skills required.
The player/coach manager is still a doer or worker, limiting his or her ability to manage several people. The ideal number of reports for this archetype is three to five.
The co-ordinator archetype of manager can take on the most reports. Work is standardized and skills can be acquired quickly. A number in the range of 10 to 15 direct reports is typical for the co-ordinator.
Leaders don’t need to be managers, but managers need to be leaders. A manager will get the bales moved, but a leader will inspire you to move them.
Craig Macfie, CPA, CA, PAg is a chartered professional accountant providing farm accounting and fractional CFO services through his company Spring CFO. He can be reached at [email protected].
– This article was originally published in the February 2024 issue of Country Guide.
