Things I learnt running an art show (3)

As I mentioned last week, I recently managed perhaps the largest charity art show in Australia.

It was a great success with profit up 84% from the previous year. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way.

Lesson 2: Find the right niche for people.

Obviously every person has their own set of abilities. Everyone is great at some things, good at some things and lousy at other things.

Highly successful businesses free people up to focus on the things they are great at and keep them away from the things they're lousy at.

If you ask people to do things that they're lousy at what happens is that they become frustrated, unproductive and demotivated. The pace of work slows to a crawl.

At the art show we had a person who was brilliant at art and another person who was brilliant at infrastructure. My job, as manager, was to free up the art person to concentrate solely on that and the infrastructure person to focus solely on that.In your practice do you have the right people doing the right tasks? Some people are fantastic on the telephone, some people are terrible. Some people love paperwork, some people hate it.

Have you as manager structured things so people are in their happy, productive niches? A person who loves paperwork will get through five times as much in a day as someone who hates it. They will also be constantly creative and finding improvements.

Another lesson next week...