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Your Internal Board of Directors ... Part I: Who's In Charge?

Guest post by: Sheila Kelly

Article Overview: Have you noticed? When it comes to running your business, you have a lot of different voices in your head. You have the voice that tells you to work on your business plan, and the voice that tells you that you need to answer that email. You have the voice that encourages you to write an article to promote your business, and the voice that tells you it would never get published. You have the voice that wants you to hire an assistant, and the voice that says it’s easier to do everything yourself. With all the chatter going on in our heads, it is actually amazing that anything gets done!

Your Internal Board of Directors ... Part I: Who's In Charge?

Have you noticed? When it comes to running your business, you have a lot of different voices in your head. You have the voice that tells you to work on your business plan, and the voice that tells you that you need to answer that email. You have the voice that encourages you to write an article to promote your business, and the voice that tells you it would never get published. You have the voice that wants you to hire an assistant, and the voice that says it’s easier to do everything yourself. With all the chatter going on in our heads, it is actually amazing that anything gets done!

Psychologists Hal and Sidra Stone call these voices “parts,” and they can be likened to an internal board of directors, constantly and often incessantly giving advice, opinions, and direction. In their article, “Which Business Self Are You?” the Stones explore Michael Gerber’s three aspects of entrepreneurship in connection with the voices in our heads:

The Entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is the part of us who is creative and innovative.

The Technician. The technician is the part of us that is the doer. It has specific skills and likes to use those skills.

The Manager. The managerial self takes the entrepreneur's ideas and determines how they will be put into practice.

For a business to succeed there needs to be someone working on it (the technician), someone coming up with the ideas and vision (the entrepreneur), but also someone to plan and implement those ideas (the manager).

Ask yourself: Which of these roles do I use for decision-making most of the time? How can I more effectively engage all aspects of my internal Board of Directors?

In Part II of this article, we will delve deeper into each of the roles of the Internal Board of Directors.

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Article Tags: business, decisionmaking, entrepreneur, Hal Stone, manager, Michael Gerber, Sidra Stone



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