If I ask you the above question, I am sure most of us will reply as a Soldier. Primarily there are two reasons for this obvious answer –
1. Being a Soldier means that we are in the battlefield, in midst of action and fighting against the enemy. All of us like to be in that role.
2. The second reason is that most of us do not know the meaning of a Scout.
So to clarify, let me first define what a Scout means – “A Scout is a soldier or other person sent out ahead of a main force so as to gather information about the enemy’s position, strength, or movements.”
Now that you know what a Scout means – try to answer the question. In a growing business, you will find your role is changing from a soldier to a scout. This is the most difficult transition we face. Most of the time we are unprepared for it, and we end up being a lousy Scout; which keeps us in the centre of all business activities and impacts our business results.
If you are a founder of a business, in your initial phase of struggle, you have no option to be a Soldier. You must lead from the front and make things happen. The real challenge is – our working style gets so much moulded by the Soldier role that when it is time to put our thinking hat and be a Scout; we still act as a Soldier and get deeply involved in action.
As your business grows, your role changes from frontline doer to more of a thinker, analyser, planner and finally an executor. In this new role you need to execute through others and create a system where you can monitor the result through remote control. All this requires unlearning and learning – which is the most difficult challenge a business owner faces. Those who succeed; manage to scale up their business; those who struggle either stagnate or decline.
All of us want to scale up and take our organisation to next level, the biggest struggle we face in the journey is in changing our role from a Soldier to a Scout. Think about it – are you prepared for this change?