Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Delegation

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The team’s view.
September 8, 2023

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The team’s view.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

It makes us Hyde when we want to be Jekyll.

It makes us owls when we want to be flowers.

It makes us angry and resentful when we want to please.

It makes us defensive when we want to improve.

It makes us sullen when we want to co-operate.

It makes us passive when we want to be proactive.

It makes us jobsworth’s when we want to take responsibility.

It makes us dot i’s and cross t’s when we want to be making a dent in the world. A dent that matters.

We can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. We spend all day watching it, second-guessing how it feels, how it will react, covering our backs by passing jobs up. It feels like we care more about ‘The Boss’ than we do about our clients.

It’s everything we hate about being employees – the workflows, the time-sheets, the endless check-ins, the inability to fix things we know are wrong, never getting to see the big picture – everything that gets in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stops us focussing on what really matters – the client.

No wonder we can’t wait to get away of an evening.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

 

We know exactly who it is.  And we don’t care who knows it.

 

It’s not a monster.

It’s just a gap.

When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.

And everyone will be free.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The founder’s view.
September 7, 2023

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The founder’s view.

‘The Boss’ is a monster!

It makes me Hyde when I want to be Jekyll.

It makes me owl when I want to be flowers.

It makes me angry and distrustful, when I want to inspire.

It makes me nit-pick when I want to mentor.

It makes me micro-manage when I want to delegate.

It makes me control when I want to lead.

It makes me focus on the day-to-day when I want to make dent in the universe. A dent that matters.

I can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. I spend my evenings and weekends wrestling with it. It won’t let me leave. I can’t go on holiday – not properly. My body may be on the beach but my head is wondering what the monster’s up to while I’m away. I’m often on the phone or laptop, checking in.

‘The Boss’ is everything I hated about working for someone else – the workflows, the time-sheets, the pointless meetings – everything that got in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stopped us focussing on what really matters – the client.

Everything I swore I’d never become.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

Shhh.

Sometimes I think it’s my team.

 

 

It’s not a monster.

Its just a gap.

When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.

And everyone will be free.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Two heads are better than one
September 6, 2023

Two heads are better than one

If you’re lucky, you start your business with someone else, or maybe even as a trio.

Two heads, three heads are better than one.

Being a co-Boss helps you share the hard work of getting going, gives you a sounding board for ideas, and brings additional valuable resources to the business – whether that’s talents, time or even money.

But good things do come to an end, often perfectly amicably.  People grow, their circumstances change, their talents call them to new things.

That’s fine, if people need to move on, they need to move on.

The problem lies with what they take with them, locked inside their heads, no longer accessible to the business they’ve left.

Perhaps they were the operations person, who just made everything work.  Perhaps they were the sales wizard, effortlessly charming clients aboard.  Or the finance pilot, keeping a firm hand on the money tiller. Or perhaps they were the ideas person, driving the forward movement of the business.

Obviously, if you’d known this was going to happen, you’d have found a way to pull all that accumulated know-how out of their heads before they went.  But if not, how do you reconstruct that missing part?

 

The good news is that although what your co-Boss knew is still inside their head, it’s actually also inside the heads of everyone else in the business, and, crucially, inside the heads of your clients.

It may not be written down, but it is there, and can be re-constructed into an explicit Promise of Value, along with the Customer Experience Score that follows from that, turning buried knowledge into a practical, usable, evolvable asset.

Only, once you’ve dug it up, don’t keep it to yourself.  Share it with everyone in the business.  Then share the work of living it so everyone can become your co-Boss.

Because many heads are always better than one.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Even if a Boss has already disappeared.

 

Ask me how.

 

 

Lynchpin – from the other side
September 1, 2023

Lynchpin – from the other side

Being a lynchpin in someone else’s business is a good career strategy.

If you are the someone else whose business it is, you might want to think about whether it’s a good business strategy.

A Customer Experience Score isn’t just for capturing your expertise, although that’s where it usually starts.

It can get you up from over that barrel too, by capturing others’ expertise.

Then you can make everyone a lynchpin in your business for the right reason.

Because of what they do, and how, rather than what they know.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

Daring
August 30, 2023

Daring

 

“10 times is easier than 2 times” by Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy is by no means a how-to book, but it is a very useful book.

I’ve heard of the basic premise before – that radical change is paradoxically easier than incremental change, because it makes you think completely outside the box about how you might get there.   For me, that intersects nicely with Category Pirates thinking, where you stop competing with everyone else in a particular category, and create a completely new one for yourself.

What was new for me was the idea of applying this thinking repeatedly in your life and in your business.  And not just you.  Your team too.   Which reminded me of Derek Sivers’ story of recruiting his own replacement for a job, before he announced his intention to leave.

This might seem a long way from my idea of a Customer Experience Score.  A well-documented and well-rehearsed ‘what we do round here’.

It isn’t.

Creating the Customer Experience Score for your business unlocks the first 10x, because it reminds you what your business is here to do; it forces you to think about Roles (which goes even further than ‘who not how’), and it makes you think completely differently about how you manage it.

It enables you to Disappear as a Boss.  It makes you create a self-managing business.

Once you’ve done that,  it’s easier to 10x through rapid growth (say 40%) per year, or by creating 10 instances of the business (by franchising, for example).

And now you have a Customer Experience Score written down it becomes easier to 10x again.

All you have to do, is ask at every Group Practice: ‘How do we make this 10x better?‘

The Score will show you what to change and how.  Which makes doing the change even easier.

 

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

The hard part is daring in the first place.

 

Letting go of the tiger
August 16, 2023

Letting go of the tiger

During that tiger-riding phase of growing your business, when you’re growing fast, when new opportunities are coming at you thick and fast, and it feels right to take as many of them as you can; it can feel like everything is out of control.  It can feel like nothing is working as it should, so you have to be everywhere, supervising everything, checking everything, or the tiger will run away with you.

You might think that this would be the worst time to start writing down your Customer Experience Score.

You’d be wrong.

Because, by giving yourself space to get your music out of your head, you also give yourself space to think about how ‘doing things right’ can be made easier to achieve.  Sometimes ridiculously so, with a ridiculously simple change, such as creating a Prop for others to use that literally helps them see through your eyes.

Because, as you write down what till now has only been playing inside your head, you see how the part you wrote for the violins is very close to what the violas will need, and the oboes, and with a few more tweaks, the clarinets.  Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is much smaller than you thought.

And because, as you write the first few parts, and see how easy it is to get your Orchestra to play them beautifully, even when you’re not in the room, you realise that the next part you write is likely to work just as well, and the one after that, and the one after that.   Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is far less urgent than you thought.

And so you realise that you can loosen your hold.  That the tiger isn’t going to run away with you.  That you can spend time building her a generous and beuatiful reserve in which she can flourish.

You’ll never be done of course, but now you know how easy it is, you can enlist your team to help you.

And once they know as much as you do about how your business should work to make and keep its promises to customers, you can step back and enjoy watching your tiger become a streak.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

It also makes it easier.

Ask me how.

 

 

 

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?
August 15, 2023

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?

‘Founder’s syndrome’ – some extracts from the Wikipedia definition:

“The organization is strongly identified with the founder”.

“Obsessive leadership style”.

“Founders tend to make all decisions without a formal process or feedback from others.”

“little meaningful strategic development, limited professional development. little organizational infrastructure in place”

“Higher levels of micromanagement”

“no succession plan.”

“recruits find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.””

“The founder becomes increasingly paranoid as delegation is required, or business management needs are greater than their training or experience.”

 

To me, much of this looks like the classic, painful transition from one-person-band, to few-person-band, to full-blown company.

Which in the rather smug and contemptuous view of the writers of this Wikipedia entry, is all too often the transition from a small, personal, impact-driven, human-scaled business to a large, impersonal, money-focused capitalist corporation.

The founder wants to keep things personal and true to their original vision.

New owners or new management want to make things efficient, corporate money-oriented, and therefore impersonal.

In other words, as far as the founder is concerned, they want to make it ‘someone else’s business’. (https://gibbsandpartners.com/blog/2021/09/design-your-business-or-it-will-be-designed-for-you/)

Of course the founder resists.

So would I.

 

There is a preventive for ‘Founder’s syndrome’:

 

Become a Disappearing Boss.

 

Embed the founding vision and personality into the operating processes of your business before you try to scale, with a Customer Experience Score .

You’ll be able to scale without managers, without investors – other than the people you serve. Without going corporate.

The best of both worlds: personal, true to the original vision and magnifying your impact.

Even better, once its built into the way your business works, your Score takes on a life of it’s own, nurtured and improved by everyone in the business.

It becomes harder for anyone to interfere – even you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

The Disappearing Boss is currently available as a ‘done for you’ option and a 1:1 coaching programme.

From next month it will also be available as a DIY option as The Disappearing Bosses Club.

I’m looking for 7 founders of unique and amazing impact-focused businesses, employing between 3 and 9 people, who want to magnify their impact without losing what makes them unique, to help me test and refine my design for this part of my business.

It will be a 3 month committment, at a pioneer price, that will add value to your business, or your money back.

DM me if you want to know more.

All in it together
August 11, 2023

All in it together

Mintzberg’s continuum of management

Of course the fundamental problem with adopting any of these ‘nicer’ forms of management, is that the underlying asymmetries of power, earnings and value productivity are all still there.

And when push comes to shove, it most often turns out that we’re not ‘all in it together’.

Workers are not ‘family’.

We can be thrown out on our ear.

So it’s no surprise that many people distrust the language of ‘nice’ management.

No surprise that I’m a firm believer in employee ownership.

No surprise that I think the best way to prepare your team to own your business is to get them running it alongside you first.

And that the best time to start is while you’re still small enough to adapt.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Getting people to do what needs doing
August 10, 2023

Getting people to do what needs doing

When I was in infant school, I used to play with my friends.  We’d pretend to be characters in a story, then play-act the story, making it up as we went along.    We’d decide who was going to be who, then start with a scenario from our story.  We never knew how the story was going to end, or even where it would go next.   We’d discuss that between ourselves as we play-acted – ‘what if you do this, then I’ll do this, and she can do that’.  We always agreed on something mutually satisfying to all parties, and so ended up with a very satisfying play, that would often extend over multiple playtimes.

We played other, more formal games too – skipping – with two people turning the rope, and everyone taking a turn to jump in and do tricks; or French skipping, where we each took turns to make a kind of cat’s cradle out elastic held taut between two people’s ankles.

Whether though consultation and improvisation, or by using a shared set of rules, we collaborated to produce a shared outcome we were all happy with.

What we didn’t realise, couldn’t realise at that age, was that what we were actually doing was getting each other to do what needed doing.

In other words, management.

Nowadays we tend to think of management as a mostly top-down affair.   Imposed in the belief that people a) won’t work unless they’re made to, and b) need to be surveilled to make sure they do. “Getting [other] people to do what needs doing”.

That’s a very 18th century view, based on a fundamental and very apparent asymmetry of power.

The asymmetry is still there, but many organisations have found more equitable ways to get people to do what needs to be done:

And seems that the further to the right, the better the performance as a whole.  Although most organisations I’ve worked in, have barely made it past a ‘participative’ style.

Personally, I think this diagram should look more like this:

Which is why The Disappearing Boss is actually about making everyone a Boss.

But then, I never did like games where someone was ‘in charge’.

Not even when it was meant to be me.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

HT to Seth Godin for the prompt.