Many people tell me about their overwhelming span of control - the numerous responsibilities they have to attend to on daily basis.
It is not a secret that all CFO's and Controllers in small and mid-size companies store hatboxes under their desks and change on hat after another as daily needs require: just an hour ago you sat down at our desk in your business clothes attending to the natural responsibilities of finance and accounting, but here you are in the police chief hat enforcing civility of human relations, and there you are in a Napoleonic bicorn developing global expansion strategies, in a deerstalker applying forensics in search of a lost container, in a backwards baseball cap discussing with laidback computer geeks the requirement for IT upgarde, in a wig reading a legal brief, etc. etc.
The smaller the company, the larger the hat collection. Just look at the job listings for our positions – usually it is a laundry list of duties frequently broken down into up to ten sections, each covering separate group of functionality. Your scope of control is expected to encompass at least 30 diverse responsibilities. It is an established fact and we don’t need an evidentiary hearing to prove it.
Clearly this wide repertoire of roles is a major source of pressure and frustration we experience. So, as the fist step on the road of improving our wellbeing, I thought it would be healthy to look at the etiology of this issue, i.e. to understand how we ended up in this state of affairs.
Why other execs stick to their narrow niches of know-how? Why it is not a VP of Sales who is responsible for strategic planning? Why we are expected to be chief administrative and information officers, human resources managers and legal liaisons? The answers actually may help us to look at this boatload of duties not as a punishment of fate, but rather as a source of pride and positive reinforcement.
The way I see it, there are three major forces pushing us into the realm of endless tasks. I will describe them in my next post.