Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Delegation

Exit
April 5, 2019

Exit

Investors and business angels have a clear exit strategy – grow fast for 3-5 years, sell up and crystallise the gains. Happily, this strategy often coincides with that of the entrepreneur, who wants to get this business idea going, and then move on to the next.

Most small business owners don’t have an exit strategy, or certainly don’t start with one.

Thinking about exit often only happens when some event reminds us of our mortality. If that doesn’t happen, the business simply winds down to nothing alongside its owner.

Partly this is due to our natural tendency to think short-term; partly because we simply can’t imagine ourselves without our business, and partly because we don’t believe our business could survive without us.

Perhaps then, rather than focus on our own exit, we could focus instead on the future life of our business as we would focus on the future life of our child – with the aim of making it independent?

If a business was a child, we would nurture it through the early years, then start giving it more responsibility and autonomy, so that when the time is right, the child leaves us, ready, willing and able to make its own dent in the universe.

This doesn’t mean you exit your business with nothing, it just changes who you might sell it to.

Who better than the people who helped you raise it?

Dismantling the E-myth
April 2, 2019

Dismantling the E-myth

In his E-myth books, Michael Gerber identifies three key roles in a business: the entrepreneur, who drives the vision for the business; the technician, who does the work, and the manager who acts as a bridge between them, planning and organising the work of technicians to achieve the entrepreneur’s vision.

If the vision is shared by everyone, do you then need managers?

I don’t think so, but you do still need management – a way for the technicians to know what they have to do, and how well they are achieving the vision, so they can work out for themselves how best to move forwards.

This is great news for small business owners, because I’ve only ever met one person who wanted to be a manager.

If the vision is explicit and shared, and technicians manage themselves, do you then need an entrepreneur?

No, but you do need entrepreneurship – a way for technicians to see new ways to deliver the vision profitably.

So, if you can push both management and entrepreneurship down to the people who actually do the work, what happens to the entrepreneurs who founded it?

Their baby will have grown up, to be independent, autonomous with their original vision still in its DNA.

They get to choose what they do next.

Overhead
March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

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.

Leeway – but not complete freedom
February 17, 2019

Leeway – but not complete freedom

Quilts have often been made collaboratively, especially in America, where the idea of making a quilt in components (called blocks) really took off. This method meant a quilt top could be assembled very quickly, since the production of blocks was effectively parallelised. If you wanted a bigger quilt, you simply enlisted more friends.

Once the component blocks were completed, they were sewn together to make the top, which was then tacked together with the filling and backing layers. Then everyone got together again to quilt the 3 layers into a single unified whole – the finished quilt.

As well as speeding up the making, this block method allows considerable leeway to the individual contributors. In this Friendship quilt, each contributor has chosen their own block design, but they’ve clearly been given a colour scheme to work with, and at least some fabrics have been shared – its leeway, but not complete freedom.

The result is a bedcover that looks coherent, but is still lively and full of interest. An excellent example of balancing tight rules with interpretive latitude.

Those quiltmakers knew a lot about creative collaboration.

Themes and variations
February 6, 2019

Themes and variations

A common reaction to the idea of writing a ‘score’ for a business is “That’s not possible! There are just too many variations we’d have to account for.”

The trick is not to try.

In practice, most of what happens in a business follows, or should follow a ‘usual route’. So we build the score around that ‘usual route’. That keeps it simple and uncluttered, which in turn makes it easy to follow and learn.

Variations usually occur around the technicalities of what the business is doing. They take place at the level of the musician not the score. And as a professional the musician can be safely left to use their judgement to deal with the variation.

As a more concrete example, take dog-walking. Several years ago I worked with a client to franchise their dog-walking business.

We created a ‘usual route‘ for running a dog walk. It covers collecting dogs from their homes and transporting them to the local park, taking them through exercise, training and play in the park, then reversing the process to get them all back home.

All dogs are different. They have personalities and with them preferences about how they come into contact with other dogs. These preferences need to be taken into account at various points in the dog-walking process. It would have been madness to try and include every possible preference and combination of preferences in the main process. So, instead the business owner created a separate ‘Techniques’ handbook, which contained tips and tricks for different situations.

This meant that in the manual, we could simply reference to the appropriate section in the Techniques handbook, together with an instruction along the lines of “Use your knowledge of dog behaviour and your experience of dogs to apply the appropriate technique(s). You’ll find them here ->.”

This created the right balance between dictating the ‘score’ and leaving the musician free to get on with playing it, while at the same time providing helpful hints for variations that might not happen very often.

The result was that everyone was happy. Our first franchisee was delighted: “I know exactly what I have to do.”, and the new franchisor could be confident that her service would continue to delight clients as she grew her business.

We can do this because we’re dealing with human beings, not machines.

Elaboration

Elaboration

Sam at Lewisham Local asked me to elaborate on what I mean by this:

‘scaling successfully is about creating an ecosystem where others can lead’

Here goes…

When you first start a small business you are in control. You make all the promises. You keep them. You are the leader of your own business.

When you can no longer keep up with demand yourself, you add more people. At first, this works, because you are offloading jobs that are easily defined (which could also be outsourced) such as bookkeeping, accounting, diary management, or you are handing over whole areas of responsibility such as sales for example, to another person and simply letting them get on with it.

Beyond a certain size though – perhaps around 5 -7 people – this approach starts to break down. You’ve run out of ‘easy to define’ jobs to offload, and the people you’ve handed responsibility to turn out to have completely different ideas about the promises you are making and how to keep them. They need watching, and controlling.

You are still the only leader, and you spend your time monitoring what other people are doing instead of working on your business. So you get stuck at this scale. You may even decide to scale back at this point, because going further just seems too hard.

What you really want is people who don’t need to be told, who can take responsibility for delivering on behalf of the business, each one of them a leader for the business.

But in order to do this, your people need an ecosystem that supports them.

For me this ecosystem looks like this:

  • It gives absolute clarity on who the business serves and what the business promises to do for them.

  • It nails down the values and behaviours that drive ‘the way we do things’ round here, setting expectations for behaviour for everyone in and around the business.

  • It is structured around processes, not functions, and certainly not management hierarchy. Processes start and end at the boundary of the organisation – they go from end-to-end, following the lifecycle of a prospect through to client and beyond. In this way the ecosystem stays focused on the people it serves. Everything that goes on inside the ecosystem is a side-effect of attracting and serving clients.

  • Processes provide clear direction on what needs to be done when, both to make the right promises to the right people, and to deliver on those promises – without specifying in excruciating detail how to do those things (although they may reference a library of techniques or ‘how-to’s that beginners may find useful).

  • Processes set out the usual run of events, without enumerating every possible scenario. This means that technical expertise still resides in the individual, who can exercise their professional judgement to handle exceptions, based on their own knowledge and experience, plus the values and behaviours expected of them.

  • It is based on roles, not individuals. Roles have clear responsibilities to clients. Roles run processes and each process is the exclusive responsiblility of one role. In effect every role-player leads their own processes. Roles may participate in processes they are not responsible for.

  • It ensures that everything is visible to everyone, and that all the resources needed to perform a role are available as and when they are needed.

  • Finally, it includes feedback mechanisms, so that it can improve and evolve. This includes rewards, which to be effective, should fairly reflect individual contributions.

In this ecosystem individuals can play more than one role, and the same role can be performed by many individuals. This is how you scale – you simply add more individuals in the roles you need.

Ideally, an individual runs an entire end-to-end process – effectively becoming a mini-business on their own, a bit like a franchise, but internal. This is how you can scale and transform to an employee-owned, employee-run business.

To begin with, you as the original leader will want to monitor and action all feedback, but roles should see everything too. Their responsibilities include improving the ecosystem based on this feedback.

Over time, as you become more confident that your people are running the business as it should be, you can let them get on with it – they will lead the business instead of you.

It takes a while to build an ecosystem like this, but once you have it, scaling becomes much easier.

That was a long elaboration – thank you for reading it.

Thank you Sam for asking it.

Ownership
January 25, 2019

Ownership

“How do I get my people to think like an owner?”

Make them an owner.

Seeing it through
January 24, 2019

Seeing it through

Seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side.

But how do you achieve that when you need to be flexible in how you assign resources?

By having a clear, high-level process for handling cases, then making sure everyone knows how to run it, and that all the information needed to move that case forward is accessible to anyone who needs it at any time.

Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.

And you’ve just created a more empowering division of labour.