Next time you hear a small-business employer saying:
“Why can’t people just do things the way I want them done?”
Or a variation of it.
Ask them:
“Why does that matter to you?”
The answer is very unlikely to be “Because I’m the boss.” But if it is, dig deeper: “Why does that matter to the business?”
The real issue almost certainly isn’t that the boss is a control freak. It’s much more likely that they’ve spent a lot of personal time and effort building an amazing customer experience, and they feel it’s being jeopardised by other people, who maybe don’t care as much as they do, or don’t have as much at stake as they do.
The trouble is that in building up a successful business on their own, they’ve internalised everything they’ve learned. They’ve created tacit knowledge, locked inside their head. And now that knowledge has to be passed on.
And passing it on is hard.
Because the owner no longer knows what what they know, so they can’t volunteer that information.
And the other person doesn’t know what they don’t know, so they can’t ask the right questions.
The answer is to find a way to extract that tacit knowledge in a way that creates context and meaning for anyone that has to use it.
For me, that means, instead of just dumping that knowledge into small, generic functional areas, like ‘invoicing’ or ‘customer onboarding’; you organise it into a structure that keeps everyone focused on the customer and the customer experience, and makes it easy to learn, follow and improve.
In other words, it means re-framing the business as a system for making and keeping promises, then documenting the processes that make sure that happens consistently every time.
Doing this means a business owner only has to get everything out of their head once. While many others can learn from them, together or separately.
This is how you can deliver an amazing customer experience at scale.
Discipline makes Daring possible.