Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Delegation

Rearranging deckchairs
May 26, 2021

Rearranging deckchairs

Before you cut costs in your central department of government or business by removing a job it currently does, here’s a good question to ask:

  • Can we remove the need for this job completely?

If the answer to that is ‘No’, then ask these:

  • Who is best placed to do this job effectively and efficiently?
  • What resources do we need to shift along with the responsibility?
  • What resources will they need to set themselves up to do this job?

I’m all for devolution.  The closer to the front line the better, but too often ‘devolution’ merely means shifting where the work is accounted for without shifting the resources needed to get it done.

When you’re looking for real efficiency gains, shuffling deckchairs is rarely the best answer.

Collective authenticity
May 11, 2021

Collective authenticity

If authenticity is doing, not being, it follows that for a company of more than one person, achieving corporate authenticity requires everyone to be ‘doing’ what is consistent with the company’s values and personality.

How can you ensure that?

  • Be crystal clear on the Promise you make as a business.   Use that clarity to attract and recruit only those who share it.  That way you can be confident that whatever work they produce ‘from within themselves’ will align with it.
  • Support them with a Customer Experience Score to make learning easy.

Then give them the responsibility to deliver, and the autonomy to do so.

As all master craftsmen know, practice never makes perfect, but it does make authentic.

And authentic is what clients really buy into.

Teams
April 9, 2021

Teams

The team you’ve built for your business will have things in common.   There are reasons you decided to hire them and they decided to work with you.   There are reasons that you’ve stayed together.

Some of those reasons will be around shared values, behaviours and principles.  Some of them will be to do with an alignment of vision and purpose.

Some will be entirely to do with their own personal preferences, aims and desires – perhaps proximity to home, an easier commute,  a less demanding job or even friendships formed.

Are those reasons enough for you to entrust them with the client experience?  I hope so.

But it might be better to be explicit about the values, behaviours, principles, vision and purpose.

That way you’ll both know for sure.  And be able to act accordingly.

Devolution
January 18, 2021

Devolution

Often, when we think about delegation, we’re thinking about merely handing over execution to someone else.  We’ve already worked out what needs to be done, all they have to do is reproduce that.   This somewhat mechanical form of delegation works well for really simple and generic tasks such as answering the phone, booking meetings, or filling in forms, or even for generic functions such as preparing annual accounts, fulfilment, distribution, even marketing.

But for what really weighs down a business owner, delegating execution doesn’t help much.

I remember my mum telling me, when as a child I offered to go shopping for her “The shopping is the least of my worries – I still have to think about what we’re going to eat, plan the meals, and write out the list.  That’s the hard bit.” 

What we really want to be delegating is the thinking, the decision making – in other words, the management.  And that’s hard, because it means giving up power, entrusting business outcomes to other people. It means devolution.

But devolution is what really pays off.  If my siblings and I had all taken turns to ‘manage’ the household, or taken responsibility for different parts of it, I’m sure that our family horizons and opportunities would have been broadened. 9 heads – even childish ones – are always better than 1.

The good news is that as business owners we have an advantage over mum, in that we’re dealing with adults we’ve selected for shared values, principles and beliefs.  Who will welcome the ability to step up and lead.

Especially if given a score to follow while they (and you) get used to the idea.

The problem with empowerment
January 13, 2021

The problem with empowerment

The problem with ’empowering’ people, is that it implies a transfer of power from someone who has it to someone who doesn’t.

Why don’t they have it already?  How come you have it to give?  Where did yours come from?  How is it maintained?

Everyone has power.  They don’t always have the autonomy to exercise it.

Autonomy is much more powerful than empowerment.  Which is why it’s scary for the currently powerful.  And it’s a fairer bet for everyone.

HT to Gustavo Razzetti for the prompt.

“What would happen if we removed all Managers?”
July 10, 2020

“What would happen if we removed all Managers?”

Lisa Haggar started a lively discussion on this topic on LinkedIn today:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lisa-haggar-540a68117_whatnomanager-selfmanagement-timesarechanging-activity-6687251785352024065-esUl

Of course I had to join in.

Why not join in too?   I’d love to know what you think.

Why do we have managers?
July 7, 2020

Why do we have managers?

I’ve only ever met one person who wanted to be a manager.    Most other people want to be technicians (because that’s what they were in the company they left), and some are genuinely entrepreneurs.

So why do we have managers?

According to the e-myth, managers sit between an entrepreneur with a vision and the bunch of technicians who make the thing the business sells.  Managers organise technicians to deliver the vision.

It doesn’t have to be like this.   Take an orchestra.    An orchestra is a bunch of technicians, delivering the vision of someone who’s usually dead.   The nearest thing to a manager is the conductor, and that’s stretching it a bit.   The conductor doesn’t organise, they interpret, co-ordinate, keep the tempo up.

So what makes an orchestra possible?

The score.   The talent, skill and ability of the players.   Lots of practice.

If you want more impact just add more players.    If you want to play at more venues, assemble more orchestras.     The score tells everyone what they need to know.  No interface needed, no managers required.

All the extra spend goes in front of the camera, where the audience will experience it. Less overhead, more profit.  In other words, scale as opposed to growth.

Since scale is what everyone looks for, modelling a business to be more like an orchestra might make a lot of technicians and entrepreneurs very happy.

The Big Picture
June 29, 2020

The Big Picture

When you’re new to a place the kind of map that’s useful isn’t all that detailed.    All you need is something that can tell you where you are in relation to landmarks you’ll easily find and recognise, so you can see where to head next.

This kind of ‘big picture’ never happens by accident.  It’s not an aggregation of local details.   It’s designed, top-down, on purpose as a guide for strangers.

If your business is your Utopia, why not make a map of it?   Big picture enough to let people navigate safely by themselves, or easily enlist help from a passing stranger if they go astray.

You might find you get fewer pinch points, and less people stuck down blind alleys.

Re-distribution – things to learn from Macaria
June 23, 2020

Re-distribution – things to learn from Macaria

Raphael, the explorer who describes Utopia to Thomas More and his friend, hasn’t only been to Utopia.

“To these things I would add that law among the Macarians – a people that live not far from Utopia – by which their king, on the day on which he began to reign , is ties to an oath, confirmed by solemn sacrifices, never to have at once above a thousand pounds of gold in his treasures, or so much silver as is equal to that in value.   

This law, they tell us, was made by an excellent king who had more regard to the riches of his country than to his own wealth, and therefore provided against the heaping up of so much treasure as might impoverish the people.    He thought that moderate sum might be sufficient for any accident … but that it was not enough to encourage a prince to invade other men’s rights.   He also thought that it was a good provision for that free circulation of money so necessary for the course of commerce and exchange.”

This law is about re-distributing wealth to keep it circulating within an economy, which is where value is generated.

It could equally well apply to responsibility.    Responsbility, distributed and circulated within a business, is able to generate more value than if hoarded at the top.