Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Customer Experience

Rocks in the road
April 26, 2019

Rocks in the road

When a big change comes along, imposed from outside, we tend to view it as a problem. A rock thrown in our path – unnecessarily, we think.

But its possible to view it as a welcome opportunity, a chance to pause on the road and reflect on what we’re doing, why we are doing it and who for.

If I was an accountant, now that the first part of MTD is out of the way, I’d be asking myself:

  • What is the job of an accountant?

  • Who can I best serve?

  • What do they really want?

  • How does MTD and its ramifications help me put the answers to these questions in place?

That rock might just be a signpost to a better path.

Measuring what matters
April 23, 2019

Measuring what matters

Years ago, on my way to work, I’d call in to the Benjy’s sandwich bar next to Cannon Street Station to pick up breakfast. It was always full of other City workers doing the same thing.

In those days, the hot sandwiches and toast were freshly made, and there were only 2 kinds of coffee – with or without milk. You ordered at the counter, waited for your food, and paid at the till.

So far, the same as every other Benjy’s.

But here’s where it changed, because the manager of this Benjy’s had a system.

He took your hot food order, shouted it to the team in the kitchen behind him, wrote it on a paper bag and stacked that bag on top of the one before. That was it. You mooched around the shop (picking up an extra snack or two), until he called out your order. You picked it up along with a tea or coffee from the ready-made batch at the counter, then paid at lightning speed at the till.

The wait for food was never that long – he had clearly parallelised that, so that bacon, eggs and baguettes were always ready, and the stock of teas and coffees was constantly topped up, at least during the busiest times of breakfast and lunch.

All in all it probably took less time to happen than it’s taken me to write down.

What this manager had realised was that what mattered to his clients was not the wait for hot food, it was the wait to place an order. So he built his system around minimising that.

Once you saw that paper bag go down, you knew you were taken care of and could relax. Once you knew your order was in, you weren’t going to walk out without it. In fact you were likely to spend more, to fill in time while you waited.

I never visited another Benjy’s that worked like this one.

I’m guessing that central management assumed that the volume of business this manager handled was simply down to being next to a busy commuter railway station, so never thought to come and look at how he did it, so they could pass that system on to other franchisees.

I don’t know what they were measuring, but it wasn’t what mattered. Which may be why the chain failed.

Outside In
April 9, 2019

Outside In

“The most successful forms start with identifying what is on the outside that they need to interact with and then working their way back into finding the form that best suits their external purpose.”*

For a business the key ‘outside’ thing that ‘they need to interact with’ is the customer. The interaction is making and keeping the business’s Promise.

So to me, it makes sense to build a supporting framework that reflects this. That way, everyone knows what the business is there to do.

*herman wagter & jean m. russell, cultivating flows.

Perspective
April 4, 2019

Perspective

I’ve been having a problem with “employee engagement” for a while now. It’s a similar problem to the one I have with “customer experience”.

I’ve been thinking about why this is is, and I’ve realised that its because both these phrases speak from the same perspective. They’re really about ‘me the employer’ or ‘me the seller’. Actually, they are most often used by corporates, so are often really about ‘me the shareholder’.

As a result they feel (to me at least), manipulative, even extractive. They are about what I can get from you the employee, or you the customer.

Employees don’t want to be ‘engaged’, they want the same things you do:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.

Mastery – to learn and master new skills.

Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make their dent.

Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.

Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.

And the only experience the customer wants is one that gives them at least some of the same things you want:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.

Mastery – to learn and master new skills.

Autonomy – to be free to choose how we make their dent.

Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.

Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.

Perhaps if more businesses thought from this perspective, and tried to give their employees and customers what they really want, we’d have a happier, more productive world.

Virtual Reality
April 1, 2019

Virtual Reality

The right metaphor can get to the heart of your promise faster than a speeding bullet, creating an instant bond between you and the people you want to serve.

Metaphors work because they are simple, direct and emotional.

A good metaphor paints a picture worth a thousand words: “Longcroft Luxury Cat Hotel”.

The best metaphors conjure up an ongoing relationship: “Let us be Houston to your space mission”, “Welcome to our loving family”.

A metaphor that truly captures your promise acts as a compass for everyone involved in the business – your team, your collaborators, your suppliers and your clients. Whatever the situation, people will always know the right way to go.

But you can take it even further, by using your metaphor to actively design the way your business works, creating your own virtual world, where people take on different roles to play out what that metaphor means for your clients. If you get the metaphor right, it won’t even feel like work.

And that means you can make your business autonomous.

If everyone knows their part, has access to all the right props, and has a compass for when things go astray, they don’t need you to watch over them do they?

Control Freaks
March 19, 2019

Control Freaks

Control freaks get a bad rap.

In my experience, business owners become control freaks because they care about the experience their customers are getting.

They want every client to feel as if they were dealing with the owner personally, as they did back in the days when the business was the business owner.

Control freaks want to delegate. They just don’t feel they can.

They don’t know that their people can deliver that customer experience just as well as they can, if not better – even if they don’t do it in quite the same way. They’ve never discovered this, because they’ve never tried to articulate exactly what that customer experience should be. They just do it, and they expect their team to be able to just do it too.

If you want your business to run autonomously, without you, and still deliver on your original promise to customers and clients, then you need to build autonomy into your business.

It rarely happens by osmosis.

Engagement
March 12, 2019

Engagement

In my teens, I had a Saturday job in what was then a well-known department store. I worked behind the scenes in the kitchen, preparing cold sweets for the restaurant.

Breaks were the minimum the firm could get away with, and a bell rang for the start and the end of each break, to make sure you knew when it was time to go back to work. Lunch hour was 30 minutes.

One Christmas Eve, we cleaned the kitchen five times over, because in spite of the fact that nobody was shopping (everyone else in the High St. having gone home early), we were paid our £3.80 to work till 5:30 , so that’s what we would do – even if we had to make work up to do it.

In short, the firm did all they could to squeeze as much work out of us as possible. My co-worker, who made the sandwiches, broke down one Saturday, having been told for weeks that she wasn’t working hard enough, and was promptly replaced by two people.

The irony was, that the more they squeezed, the less energy we put in. All the initial enthusiasm and desire to please was wrung out of us within a few weeks. We worked to rule, doing as little as possible, and certainly not thinking about the customers.

In my next job in a small independent bakery and coffee shop, I learned a different way of working.

A bit of flexibility on my lunch hour was repaid with an early stop when I had a party to go to. I went the extra mile when it was needed, and it was noticed. I helped my colleagues out and they helped me.

I enjoyed that job. I’d start early because I looked forward to the day. I got on with my Saturday colleagues. I got to know customers. I was proud of my coffee shop. And I got paid more.

It doesn’t take much to create engagement – treat me like a responsible adult, and I’ll behave like one.

When you make a company, you make a utopia.
March 8, 2019

When you make a company, you make a utopia.

“When you make a company, you make a utopia. Its where you design your perfect world.” Derek Sivers.

As Derek Sivers pointed out – building a business is a creative act, and like imagining a building, or hearing a symphony in your head, or visualising a ballet, you can make it behave however you want it to.  

You make the rules.  

You don’t have to do what everyone else does. You don’t have to do what most people expect. You don’t have to do the same-old, same-old. You don’t even have to get big.

You can build a business that creates value in a way that matters to you an the people you serve.   That gives people the physical, mental and spiritual nourishment they need; that husbands resources; that grows everyone it touches; that empowers everyone to lead.  That enables everyone to be fully human.

For millennia people have used new and innovative technologies to do this.  And sometimes, like New Dawn Traders they re-discover ancient ways of doing it too.

What does your perfect world look like?

You can build it if you dare.